Month: June 2016

The amount of technological advancement that has occurred in the last 20 years is astonishing. The world of smart phones, social networks, and instant streaming video have taken over. People have invented things that no one even knew they needed. There’s no doubt that these new technological inventions have changed communication between people, but the question is: Has it changed communication for better of for worse?

 

With all the new social media cites in the palm of everyone’s hands the amount of writing has increased among the younger generation especially. The type of writing usually consists of multimodal compositions such as tweets, memes, or video posts. I believe these kinds of writings have really pushed the creativity of the people using these outlets because they have to figure out ways to portray larger amounts of information in very few words, one picture, or short nine second videos.

 

Aside from the benefits these new avenues of writing have provided they also come with some negative consequences. For example, there is undoubtedly less face-to-face communication between people. This is a negative because the fewer human interactions there are the less people will be “in-tuned” with reality. So even though the population’s writing ability has increased the substance of the things they are writing about has become superficial and meaningless.

This is where the idea of moderation comes into play. There are definitely some benefits that come with the new age social networking and smart phones, but people need to find a happy balance so that their use of these devices does not affect their human interactions.

Video blogs, podcasts, tweets, Instagram, Tumblr. These are just a few of all the outlets people use nowadays to communicate to an audience. The avenues of communication have changed so much in recent history. It used to be basically limited to letters, speeches, and in person communication. Now someone can tweet 140 characters and get a large message out to a huge audience.

 

These changes in the forms of communication are why it is so important that we understand how to effectively use multimodal writings. It is important to have different tools of communication at your disposal because you must be able to communicate in ways your audience can comprehend. For example, in today’s world young people have drastically short attention spans.
A majority of kids can not focus through an entire speech or read a well written essay without losing focus. This is the main reason why the forms of communication have changed so much. People have turned to shorter and quicker forms of communication so that they keep the attention of their audience, and as your audience changes often times so must your form of communication.

 

The benefits of these shorter forms of communication are that people can put out information way quicker than ever before, and the new forms of writing encourage creativity. On the other hand, these new mediums of writing also have negative effects. The writings we see displayed on outlets like twitter often lack a lot of context. What I mean is that a person might write something and make a claim, but they have given no background to the preexisting conversation they have joined. This is a problem because an audience needs to know what is being said or has already been said in a topic of discussion in order to form an educated opinion on a topic.

 

Overall, as far as writing goes I do not think we can form a conclusion that these new forms of communication are neither good nor bad, but what we can say is that they have changed our world for the mean time.

Back in high school I was blessed to have great teachers in advanced placement English courses. They thoroughly explained material from the class, but it never clicked for me. My writing was weak and lacked the ever escaping characteristic of “flow”. The frustrating part of it was that I watched powerful speeches and read interesting articles, but I still could not figure out the techniques they used to have effective writing. That was until Ms. Lueck graced us with the book of They say; I say.

 

They say; I say revealed to me the hidden aspect all of the famous speeches and writings held in common. Every one of them, at some point, treated their material as an argument. Essentially they addressed what the opposition was saying, and then they disputed their claims and furthered them with evidence. Ronald Reagan’s speech “A Time for Choosing” first addressed the statements of the democrats in America, and then he proceeded to tell his audience what his thoughts were.
Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” first pointed out what those who believed in segregation and racism were saying about him, the black community, and the country as a whole, and then he eloquently proved to those people and a larger audience why they were so terribly wrong.

 

The ironic thing about my late discovery of this tactic was that in one of my advanced English courses in high school we were actually working with a book titled Everything’s an Argument. I guess I just never gave it the attention it deserved, but as the old saying goes, better late than never. Now I can at least have a better opportunity at writing effective essays or speeches in my future.

Throughout the year we have been working with three different mediums of writing: academic writing, blog posts, and multimodal writing. When these different types of writing take form they look very different. The format of each one varies from the next, but these writings are more interconnected than what the eye can infer.

The goal of writing is to communicate an idea or opinion to an audience. The three different styles of writings we have practiced act as three separate avenues of communicating the ideas and opinions to the audience. All three styles of writing can be equally effective. So how does one decide which avenue to take? The choice of writing style will more than likely depend on someone’s audience.

 

If someone’s audience is a committee of professors or professionals in a specific field then they would most likely take the avenue of an academic writing. They would choose this style of writing because it gives credibility to the author because the audience would respect the more serious and professional tone of the paper.

 

If someone’s audience is mostly a younger generation with short attention spans then they would most likely use a blog in order to convey their message. They would do this because they realize their academic writing would be ineffective in holding the younger reader’s attention.

 

A person could choose the path of a multimodal writing for various reasons. One reason could be they are trying to reach a broad audience in a campaign style approach, and they need a visual image that communicates a message in a very short amount of time. Examples of this would be billboards, memes, and other forms of advertisement. A second reason could be the subject they are addressing has been discussed for a long time and people have become accustomed to just ignoring the conversation, so in turn they need to capture the audience’s attention again with a stirring image, video, or other form of media.

 

As a result, all three forms of writing work together. They work together to effectively communicate information from an author to an audience. The type of writing that the author chooses can depend on their audience or the environment in which they are presenting this information. Regardless, each one of these forms of writing lends itself as a tool to authors all over the world.

Making multimodal compositions has a big role in a writing classroom. It is a practical way of communicating in the real world. It is a necessity for marketing majors and other communication focused jobs. Compared to writing essays multimodal compositions are like another language. The creator of one is trying to get across the same information and analysis that he would in an essay but just in a different way.

 

The United States of America spends about 200 billion dollars a year on various forms of media advertising. Multimodality is central to most forms of advertisement; Nike, Apple, Google, etc. all use forms of multimodality in their advertising campaigns. The workers who create these compositions for the campaigns are essential to the businesses. So it would be advantageous to students if they had the skills to be able to fill these positions companies are searching for.

 

Aside from giving students a future advantage in the workplace, multimodal compositions nurture the creativity of students. I will concede a student must be creative when writing an essay, but multimodal compositions require an artistic creativity too. A student must be able to express an idea more often with images than only with writing. This forces students to think “outside-the-box”. This kind of thinking leads to a lot of innovation, and gives students a wider range of rhetorical tools to be able to use in the future.

My research topic was about alcohol on college campuses. Specifically I focused on binge drinking and under-age drinking, and how colleges could curb the negative effects they both have on students. Below are two examples of images that were successful in their attempt to limit alcohol abuse:

I immediately found this picture to be very shocking. Which in retrospect is actually what the creator of this image was intending to do. He or she wanted to grab their audience’s attention. They wanted to grab their attention so they would actually listen to what they had to say. Without assuming too much about what the author was thinking, I believe the author understood  young adults have constantly heard people telling them to drink responsibly and over time they have become unaffected by these attempts, so they put a gripping image of a man with a beer as his head on display so the people reading it would naturally be drawn to read the text. If the audience reads the text then the goal would be that they begin to associate drinking with violent crimes and other negative results. This would provide a better opportunity to limit binge drinking.

In a way the designer of this image took the same route as the previous one. He or she took an image that would take the audiences’ attention, but the image they chose this time was a familiar image rather than an out of the ordinary one. The author most likely assumed if a person saw this image they would stop and read it because they associate the format of it with the branded image “Keep Calm and Chive On”, but at second glance they would notice the message it had on it. The skull and cross-bones along with the writing gives a negative connotation toward binge drinking which is a smart rhetorical move by the creator of this image. This is another effective way of conditioning people to make more responsible decisions.