As you decide which sources to include in your essay, keep in mind not only how well the sources will help you achieve your goals and meet your readers’ expectations but also how they will appeal to your readers and how your readers might interact with them. If your readers are actively engaged with your essay — navigating its contents, viewing images and other illustrations, following links to related sources, and so on — they are more likely to find themselves intrigued with and influenced by your line of argument.

Among the most important design decisions you’ll make as you create your multimodal essay is where you’ll place each media source and how you’ll call attention to it. In most cases, you’ll want to introduce the source before the reader encounters it in the text. In this sense, the placement of media sources follows the general guidelines for placing illustrations. You should refer to the source in the body of the text, position the source near where it is mentioned, and provide some sort of caption or figure title to help readers see the connection between it and its mention in the text.

Your decisions about how you’ll call attention to a media source — that is, how you’ll stage it — will depend on how central the source is to the points you are making in your essay. If the source is incidental to the essay — if it is, for example, little more than additional information that provides a modest amount of extra support for a point — then you need not stage it in a way that calls it to the attention of your readers. A photograph of a speaker, for example, might do little more than allow readers to connect a face to a name. In this case, the photo might simply be set off in the margin of the document or aligned along the right side of a paragraph. In contrast, if the media source is a critical part of your essay, you’ll want to ensure that your readers pay attention to it. A video source might be placed so that it takes up the complete width of the page, and a detailed caption or figure title might provide information that would lead the reader to view or listen to it.