FOR YOUR WEBSITE REVISIONS & UPDATES, please include 300+ words of commentary about the rhetorical scenario + design choices you're making in your ePortfolio.

 

WHAT SHOULD I COMMENT ON?

• Rhetorical Context

• Navigation Tools: Tabs, Hyperlinks, Buttons

• Orienting Materials: Titles, Dates, Author information, Overviews/Abstracts/Key points

• Eye Track

• Design Choices: Pull-Out-Quotes, Images, Captions

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Tips for writing your FORMAL RETROSPECTIVE

The Multimodal Discourse Analysis paper challenges you to reflect on your content and design choices, explain why you made these choices, and comment on why this was a great choice for your targeted audience.

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For a quick review of what Multimodal Discourse Analysis is, visit https://www.diggitmagazine.com/wiki/multimodal-discourse-analysis

 

Comment on RHETORICAL CONTEXT from your audience's perspective. Intuitively, students write about how much time they invested in building a website or what they like about their ePortfolio. It is fine to make these sorts of felt-sense commentary; however, the focus of your Analysis should be more formal with emphasis on class strategies that you used as you built your ePortfolio.

 

Early in your ANALYSIS, comment on the rhetorical context: author (you), purposes (for assessment in this class? also for friends? also for other rock climbing enthusiasts?), audience (the professor? class peers? family? friends? internet searchers?) and genre (multi modal with writing that includes a film review and a feature-style narrative).

 

Think back to the Aristotle's Rhetorical Triangle as you reflect on your rhetorical choices. Some questions you might ask before you write about the rhetorical scenario:

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1) What might a reader want to know when they visit my page? what might the professor be looking for on the page? what might a family member look for? a peer? someone interested in the medical field? someone wanting to read a review of the film?

      NOTE: When someone visits a webpage, they're more interested in what they want out of the pages than what the author wants them to see or understand. Make sure your abstracts and orienting comments are audience oriented, to help them, rather than "I/me" oriented, about what you wanted to do.

2) What choices did you as a designer make to accommodate these audiences in light of your purpose/s? This is at the heart of your Analysis commentary.

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It is fine to clarify that the rhetorical context includes multiple purposes: to share writing for assessment in the class (W131, W140, etc), to share your work with audiences beyond the classroom (peers, family members, outside readers with similar interests), and/or possibly others like an online gaming community or club/group.

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NAVIGATION TOOLS for YOUR ePORTFOLIO

Next think about navigation tools like TABS, HYPERLINKS, and buttons that help readers move around your website. Why did you arrange these the way you did? How will they help your audience quickly access information? Did you add a menu at the bottom or "next page" options to make navigation from the bottom of one page to the top of another easier? If so, why? If not, why?

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In addition to rhetorical context and navigation tools, comment on ORIENTING MATERIALS--information that orients your reader to what materials are on the page--like clear titles, dates for drafts, and brief overviews/abstracts that help the reader know what is on the page, when it was written/published, and a little about the scope of the content.

 

NEW CONCEPT: EYE TRACK

https://vwo.com/blog/eye-tracking-website-optimization/

Part of eye track is the way that a reader/viewers eyes move across the page. You, as a designer, guide their eyes on every page through the choices you make with image placement, design choices, larger/smaller fonts, and directional cues, like an arrow or infographic.

 

PULL-OUT-QUOTES

Even here, on the website design page, it's ideal to include visual emphasis through pull-out-quotes and images. These design choices are important because of eye track, which is the way your readers encounter and digest your work.

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IMAGES and SCREENSHOTS + CAPTIONS

It's great to integrate screenshots/images on your website design choices page as well as onto every other page of your ePortfolio. These can help illustrate your choices and continue to engage eye track to help readers move along the page. In your commentary, add WHY you placed visuals where you did and HOW these enrich the viewer's reading experience.

 

Include Captions or Comments for WHY the Visual is Used

If there is a way to put a text box to the left of your image -or- to add a caption verifying what the screenshot is of, that would be a nice addition too. Some form of caption or commentary helps folks glancing at the page know why the image is there even if they don't read the whole document.

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WHAT TO CUT, REMOVE, or MODIFY?

Remove any unused TABS -or- put something on the page that directs readers to what they might be looking for.

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CUT or change all images so that they are related to your ePortfolio [note, some images are part of a gallery where there are many images, not just one--change or delete all unrelated images]

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REVIEW: Multi-Modal Discourse Strategies

Use of several ways to share your material--words, narratives, images, videos, infographics, multi-layered artifacts--is using more than one way [more than one mode] of commenting on your topic [participating in discourse--a discussion].

 

Your use of images, videos, charts, infographics, and even pull-out-quotes is part of engaging your audience in several different ways [different modalities] to illustrate and comment on your writing project. This variety of ways for telling your immersion experience or sharing your documentary review is the use of multi-modal discourse strategies.

 

Most interactions employ more than one modality

When we talk in person, we use facial expressions, voice tones, and gestures to engage our audience. We aren't just saying words, we are engaging visually and even culturally (through audience appropriate word choices and gestures). This way of conversing uses more than a single modality or way of sharing information.

 

When a musician posts a music video, they move beyond the words (the lyrics) and the music (the genre) to creating a visual interpretation of the song for those watching the video. The singer might be sitting at a piano or riding on a motorcycle.  All of these visual choices engage the audience using more than one modality--more than one way of sharing words, ideas, emotions, and creative voice.

 

In similar ways, when you build your website and include a photo, title, and narrative, you are doing more than typing words. Your tone, word choice, and sentence structure communicate information. Your images, design choices, hyperlinks, videos, use of captions, and other engaging strategies are likewise intentional modalities you've selected to communicate more information about your materials. Using multi-modal strategies, you influence what your audience perceives and understands about what you're writing.

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STUDENT INNOVATIONS and COOL IDEAS

 

Valerie Eikenberry integrated before/after screenshots into her Multimodal reflection as a way of being multimodal as she wrote about multimodalities.

 

To see Valierie's ePortfolio visit https://valerieeikenberryiu.wixsite.com/eportfolio/copy-of-film-review-2

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Macy, Spring 2020, also placed screenshots into her WIX WEBSITE overview. She used the screenshots to help illustrate the concepts she was writing about.

 

This is an innovative way to incorporate visuals into your commentary -AND- provide visual cues that relate to your overview.

 

To see Macy's page, visit https://marn497.wixsite.com/spring2020-eng131/overview

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NEXT LEVEL THINKING:
THE THEORY BEHIND MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Othman (2017) built a concise presentation on Multimodal Discourse Analysis that comments on definitions and points to relevant theory that informs this approach. You can click through the presentation in less than 10 minutes to gain more insight on the WHAT and WHY of this approach.

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For those of you with interests in psychology, marketing, business, sociology, IT, public health, art, writing, photography, video, and/or communications--this is a MUST click through that you should save for future reference: it's great stuff!

 

Two ways to access the presentation:

• PDF icon to the left

• Link on SlideShare https://www.slideshare.net/samanothman3/multimodal-discourse-analysis-75944203

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Hope these ideas help as you design your WIX reflection.

Debbie Oesch-Minor

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