Planning your multimodal project

Composing a multimodal project requires planning, and planning takes time. You’ll have to settle on a process that works for you or, if you’re collaborating with one or more classmates, that works for all of you. You’ll also have to identify a main idea and the best genre (a video or a Web site, for example) for expressing that main idea. If the genre is not your choice but has been assigned, it will take planning to figure out how to best communicate the main idea in a particular type of composition. Planning is hard work, but it’s also full of opportunities to think and rethink, shape and reshape your project.

Sometimes you will start a project in one direction—perhaps thinking something like I’ll create a Web page that teaches people how to tie fly-fishing lures—and find, as you do research and think about your audience and purpose, that a video might be a better way to instruct your audience. The good news is that you don’t have to have everything planned before you start to compose.

Related topics:

Understanding your own composing process

Collaborating effectively with others

Deciding on a main idea

Planning support for your main idea

Choosing a genre; deciding on a delivery method