Writing as Design

Visual collage as English essay? An IB student's response to Andre Brink's novel 'An Instant in the Wind'.

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A summary of my presentation at the Learning Conference,
Grenada, Spain, 10-14 july 2005

Writing as Design: Rethinking Writing from a Multimodal Perspective

How can insights from recent theories of multimodality help us to reconceptualise writing as a resource for the design of meanings, and what are the implications for teaching writing?

Recent theories of multimodality and multimediation (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; Kress, 2003; Bolter and Grusin, 1999; Finnegan, 2002) have prompted us to think of how different modes of representation and communication contribute to meaning-making in different ways. How do diverse semiotic resources - image, word, sound, gesture - combine in practice to produce textual meanings and how do these combinations vary contextually?

As a consequence of this work on texts and textual practices, an expanded notion of compositional design, particularly in the work of Kress but also, for example, in Yancey (2004) and Sharples (1999), has emerged to rival the traditional monopoly view of literacy as a set of mental ‘skills’ embodied in the master form of words.

The Rise of the Multimodal Text

One feature of this theoretical turn has been a focus on so-called ‘multi-modal texts’. Such texts are typically ones which clearly employ a variety of elements in different modes in some coordinated way – writing, image, sound – to achieve textual effect. Common examples are media texts (news reports, web sites, political manifestos) but might also include children’s school projects and information text books.

Moreover, some genres are clearly changing in multimodal directions. In my work teaching professional writing I have seen traditionally writing-only genres such as employment CVs and workplace proposals follow a trend towards increasingly multimodal and spatialised presentation, although with no uniform pattern of change. Also, school projects and portfolios show increasing signs of multi-modal (and multi-genre) composition, though highly dependent on the opportunity spaces opened up (or not) by curriculum, assessment and the availability of technology.

The rise of the multimodal text has profound implications for reading. Where formerly a reader will have encountered blocks of written text in a text book or a newspaper article, there are more likely now to be visual elements co-occurring and combining with verbal elements on a screen. The whole notion of ‘information’ and how we use it begins to look different in this kind of communicational landscape (Oliver, 2005), with effects in both online and offline texts.

Writing, Multimodality, Education

However, the mode of writing – if it can be said to be a single ‘mode’ – persists in new sites and conditions of mediation. Firstly, there is the continuing dominance of written language, often in exclusive forms, in educational knowledge-making, -recording and accreditation. Indeed, many school teachers find themselves today under more, not less, pressure to teach traditional writing to enable their students to succeed in modern education systems. Extended writing persists as a privileged mode of knowledge demonstration, accreditation and selection at the transition points of schooling such as examination, and moreover seems to play an increasing role in bureaucratic processes such as university entrance.

In these contexts, avowedly multimodal texts (typically combinations of verbal and visual elements) are often frowned upon, or are discouraged from the start by various rubrics, criteria and guidelines. Centuries of sediment in the genres of essayist composition and the institutions that underwrite them block the development of multimodal texts.

This situation presents a serious dilemma to the teacher who recognizes the power and relevance of multimodal theories of text for learning, and wishes to empower students accordingly, but is also realistic about the opportunity spaces made available by curriculum and assessment. Many of these spaces continue to privilege writing and offer little room for change.

To teachers in this position, utopian talk of a ‘visual turn’ in culture, whereby writing is displaced to the margins and is overtaken by image, makes little sense, and leaves them – as professionals – somewhat in the cold. How much impact can a revolutionary view of multimodality have in contexts where written language is still a major source of symbolic capital?

Writing as a Changing Mode

In order to frame an answer to this vexing question, we need to consider how writing both persists and changes in multimodal textual environments. Even within electronic environments of text such as the computer or the mobile phone screen written language continues to function and indeed flourish. Does writing indeed take on new roles in these environments?

Take web logs (or ‘blogs’) as an example. Although the technology exists to design web logs as verbal/visual/auditory constructs – as multi-media texts – a five-minute search through web logs such as those in the Blogger network show that the dominant mode of composition is still overwhelmingly written prose. But writing here has changed its character. In Bolter and Grusin’s terms, the web log has remediated the traditional written diary in the new spatial environment of the screen, but still using – largely - the mode of writing. The modal resource of written language has undergone a transformation, not a demise or a displacement, in the new textual environment.

So a crucial focus of multimodal theory should be on writing itself. Writing, seen no longer as the no-question default form or the ‘gold standard’ vehicle for transmitting information and ideas, but as a mode-among-other-modes, a relational resource susceptible to design. Whereas formerly writing may have been about subjective features such as formulation or expression, or situational features such as audience or purpose, the notion of writing as design shifts attention to features such as the affordances of mode which have both individual and social dimensions.

What Kress calls the ‘affordances’ of writing do not undergo a weakening of power when considered from a multimodal point of view, but a transformation and redistribution of semiotic power in their uses and possibilities. This quality of change depends, however, not just on the design initiatives of text-makers (the new ‘writers’), but also on the spaces of opportunity socially available in textual practice.

Seeing writing from a multimodal point of view

Insight from multimodal theory may help us to see written language, as a resource for the design of meanings, in a different light. I suggest that the design metaphor asks us to consider the materiality and visuality of written language alongside its mental and verbal dimensions. How can modal awareness of writing, mindful of its powers in relation to other modes, help us to rethink and renew a dominant practice?

In this presentation I focus on one textual feature typically associated with essayist writing – quotation – in a curriculum area traditionally (and still) associated, as far as student textual production at the academic level is concerned, almost exclusively with words – the study of Literature. I will attempt to see quotation, a form of citational practice embedded in generic practice, from a modal point of view, that is as a resource which is used in the design of meanings in socially shaped and regular ways (here in the genre of the critical essay); but which undergoes transformation when placed in new situations – or ‘opportunity spaces’ – involving other modes.
I will suggest that studying literary texts in multimodal (and intermodal) ways does not simply mean opening up alternative spaces - spaces within disciplinary culture for genres and modes other than the essay. It also means revisiting, by way of other modes, the resources of writing itself.

As a diverse semiotic mode, making meanings in both ‘time-based’ and ‘space-based’ ways (Kress, 2003), writing can be remediated when seen as a mode in dialogue with other modes, not as a master form with its own sealed regularities. Multiplicity, then, is not just about adding new things. It is also about revealing depths and possibilities in the existing resources of culture.
My examples [for the Grenada presentation] come from student compositions - verbal, visual, and in combinations of different modes - about English Literature in upper secondary schools following the UK A-level and the International Baccalaureate programmes. [See above for an example of a visual collage produced by an IB Literature student for assessment]

I consider some relatively recent opportunity spaces in literary education in high schools, spaces which have opened up strikingly non-essayist possibilities for student production in a range of modes. I consider, with reference to a time-honoured textual feature of writing, the quotation, what such spaces of multi/intermodality may mean for academic writing, for disciplinary discourses and their assessment, and for broader notions of disciplinarity which have traditionally relied so heavily on the mode of writing for their self-defintion.