Recently when I made a trip to the local Safeway near campus I noticed something right when I walked in. They had positioned a rack of tortilla chips that were on sale right at the entrance of the store. They used large print and brightly colored signs to designate those items as being on sale.
They positioned the shelves of discounted tortilla chips right in the front of the store so that the attention of shoppers is drawn right to those items when they walk in. Their goal was to communicate to their audience, shoppers, that those chips were on sale. This form of communication could be labeled as multimodal composition used as a marketing strategy.
This form of marketing can related to positioning important paragraphs at the beginning or the end of an essay as to draw or keep the attention of the readers or audience. I found it very interesting to see rhetorical devices being used in non-writing formats. I’ve always recognized the grocery store’s tactics as marketing ploys, but I have never looked at them as a different form of communication or writing.