Understanding and Composing Multimodal Projects

Deciding on a main idea

Just as well-planned essays begin with a working thesis statement, your multimodal project should have a main idea around which the entire composition is focused. And be sure that your main idea addresses the “So what?” question—your main idea should be compelling and interesting and address a question or concern of interest to others. Having a main idea will help you select the best images, audio, and other elements to support that main idea. You may have to whittle away at a big, general idea to settle on a manageable main idea.

As you get started on a project, you’ll likely have lots of ideas to explore. Sometimes it’s tempting to stick with a broad subject. Most writers find, however, that doing so can actually be a problem, as there’s too much material to cover and it’s tricky to figure out how to approach the subject. “The World Wide web,” for instance, is a gigantic subject, but certainly a lot of academic writers get a lot of mileage out of projects about the web. The trick is to ask questions about the subject in an attempt to narrow it to a topic and to find your particular angle, one that matters to you.

Brainstorming ideas and then focusing and whittling down those ideas is a great way to get started. When student composer Alyson D’Amato started thinking about creating a project focused on tea (a broad subject), she came up with a list of possible angles:

organic tea	store-bought tea
black teas	green teas
tea and health	tea in different cultures
tea growing	tea brands or companies
fair trade teas	tea plants
tea popularity	brewing tea yourself
history of tea	tea flavors
uses of tea	bottled tea vs. brewed tea
serving tea (different rituals)

D’Amato knew that she couldn’t address all of these possibilities in one project. Some of the issues—tea in different cultures, for example—seemed too complex for the scope of the assignment. Other ideas—store-bought tea, for example—seemed as though they might not be interesting for her or her audience.

She identified three possibilities from the big list she generated, and then she brainstormed what she might cover for each of those possibilities:

black teas vs. green teas
- — focus on compare and contrast?
- — the differences in the plants
- — the differences in the flavors
- — the growing popularity of green tea
serving tea
- — historical tools, like really old tea-serving pitchers
- — different cultural rituals (like “high tea” in England)
- — different types of ceremonies involving tea
- — from rituals and ceremonies to tea bags in a box bought at the grocery store
brewing tea yourself
- — why do it when tea bags are so easy?
- — differences between tea bags and loose leaf tea
- — health benefits of tea
- — loose leaf tea recipes

Because she was so personally interested and invested in tea brewing herself, D’Amato decided to choose the third option, to compose a project that would teach people about brewing tea. She knew she would further develop and refine her main idea as she researched her topic, but now she had a focused starting point.