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.