Empowering the point: Pains and gains of a writer's traversals between print-based writing and multimodal composing

This study investigates an adult writer's multimodal composing and traversals across linguistic, symbolic and visual modes in a research article and PowerPoint slides. Adopting a process-oriented approach, and drawing upon analytical perspectives from ‘academic literacy’ and the concept of ‘the transmodal moment’ informed by social semiotics, this study involved analyzing multiple types of data, including drafts of research articles and slides, notes of conversations and interviews, and email exchanges, to track shifts in chains of semiosis. Findings show that before the writer became familiar with the interface design and the multimodal potential of the software, the literacy practices of print-based research articles were transferred to the PowerPoint slides. In the ensuing attempts to redesign the slides, the writer gradually developed knowledge about the multimodal systems of meaning in PowerPoint software and composition, which in turn empowered him to advance the argumentation and achieve greater clarity in the research article. The results suggest that knowledge about the semiotic potential of technology platforms is crucial for multimodal composing, and the semantic expansions taking place through transmodal chains between traditional and new literacy practices can help writers to develop a deeper and richer understanding of both written and multimodal texts.
Source: Linguistics and Education - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research