Tutorial by Margaret Smith, IRIS Center, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
What is multimodal writing?
Multimodality refers to the different modes in which we communicate. We most commonly think of speech and writing, but there are lots of modes. In person, you might make a point by emphasizing your spoken words with gestures, body language, and facial expressions. In a video, you might combine footage with voiceover, animation, and effects. In your writing, you might incorporate illustrations, charts, and graphs. Combining different modes helps to convey your argument with more depth and create a more immersive experience for your reader.
In traditional essays, we’re somewhat limited by the printed page. But in writing for the web, we’re free to incorporate all kinds of different media! Here are some practical considerations and technical tips:
Using media effectively
Make sure each piece of media serves a purpose. Ideally, your media should enhance your argument or narrative in ways that your text can’t do on its own. Maybe it’s a photo that brings a human element to otherwise faceless statistics. Maybe it’s video that immerses your reader in the sights and sounds of the place you’re describing. Maybe it’s an audio recording that brings the past to life. For each piece of media, think about what it’s doing in your overall argument.
Use captions to help your reader understand your media’s purpose. To help your media serve that purpose most effectively, use the caption to draw your reader’s attention to the aspect of it you find most important.
For example, this is a picture of the Eads Bridge, which connects downtown St. Louis to East St. Louis. In an essay about transit infrastructure, I might caption it something like this:
The Eads Bridge is the only bridge in the St. Louis region that provides transportation across the river by car, by public transit, and on foot or bicycle.
In an essay about engineering or infrastructure, I might focus instead on its technical innovations:
The Eads Bridge, engineered by James Buchanan Eads, was the first bridge across the Mississippi below the confluence. The arches shown here were a feat of engineering, built with the assistance of temporary wooden supports.
Other essays might emphasize the river itself, some aspect of downtown St. Louis, or the relationship between East St. Louis and St. Louis. It’s important to tell your reader clearly how you see the image informing the larger argument of the essay.
Use enough media to make your point, but keep it organized. It’s easy for a multimedia essay to get cluttered. Make sure that your media fits into the flow of your essay and isn’t too distracting for your reader.
Adding media in WordPress
WordPress supports lots of media types. In WordPress, all content is added by blocks. Text blocks include paragraphs, headings, and featured quotes, among others. Here are some other useful block types:
This is a cover. It’s an image with text on top.
If your image is too light or dark for your text to show up, you can adjust it in the Styles section of the Settings panel. For this one, I added a white overlay and increased the opacity of the overlay to 60%. That means that there’s a sheer white box over the picture that helps the black text show up more clearly.
Layout
WordPress also has blocks with specific layouts of text with media. Covers are one such block — they allow you to put the text on top of the image. Here are a couple other blocks that you might find useful:
This combination of media and text is… the Media & Text block. It automatically gives you a nice two column layout that places your media alongside a particular paragraph.
You can also set up your columns manually and put whatever block you like in each one.
This is a 3-column layout, where each column is the same size.
Columns are a good way to visually indicate to your reader when different kinds of content are related to one another.