Writers typically revise a draft by moving sentences or paragraphs around their paper. Word processing software makes it easy for writers to cut and paste chunks of text in a words-only draft. When a writer, for example, reads the final paragraph in a draft and realizes—either on his or her own or with a reader’s help—that the main point is buried in the concluding paragraph, it’s easy enough to move a sentence or group of sentences from one place to another and rewrite as needed.
When revising a multimodal piece, you might have to ask different kinds of revision questions depending on the mode(s) you’ve chosen to communicate your main idea.
In revising a speech, you might ask, Where is it important to pause and perhaps seek audience interaction? How can my speech be stronger with the use of props or visual aids?
In revising a slide show presentation, you might ask, Is the balance of text and visuals right? Do I need this whole table as evidence, or can I use just a detail from it? Are the slides progressing at the right pace for my audience, mainly senior citizens?
In revising a video, you might ask, Would narration help to provide “glue” between the testimony of my interviewees? Is the background music too distracting?
Thinking about revision as remix can be helpful in approaching a multimodal project. Remix is a term typically used to describe the process of taking an original audio track and adding other elements. Perhaps one of the most infamous remixes in recent times was Danger Mouse’s 2004 release of The Grey Album. To produce the album, Danger Mouse took Jay-Z’s Black Album (2003) and remixed it with the Beatles’ White Album (1968). Together, the lyrics and music from both albums—mixed and merged together—took on an entirely different tone and meaning.
A useful way to think about revision with a multimodal composition is that you are “remixing” your own work—taking an original piece or set of pieces and rearranging them, resequencing them, and perhaps adding elements. This remixing might result in a composition with more impact, better focus, or more awareness of the audience.
Student composer Marisa Williamson found that to revise her video essay, she had to keep circling back and remixing the elements of her draft. She had a lot of what she needed in her first draft; for her, revising meant rearranging in response to feedback from her classmates.
For example, when Williamson initially drafted her video piece, she sequenced the images and video chronologically—she included the images and video of John F. Kennedy’s assassination first (1963), followed by footage related to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination (1968) and the space shuttle Challenger disaster (1986), and ended with video of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City (2001).
Her classmates who saw the draft suggested that she didn’t need to tell the story chronologically to make her point. She resequenced the clips and even tried looping, or repeating, some of the clips for emphasis. Also, Williamson wasn’t sure how she wanted to include her own words in her video. In her first draft, she included her words by scrolling them along the bottom of the movie. Her classmates, however, suggested that this was distracting and that it might be interesting to record and layer her own voice over the music. She tried that at the revising stage.
Williamson, “To the Children of America” (video essay project)
Related topics:
Seeking and using feedback
Editing a multimodal composition
Revising your own work
Revising with comments