Conversing with a multimodal text
Conversing with a text—or talking back to a text and its author—helps you move beyond your early notes to form judgments about what you’ve read, seen, or heard. You might choose to pose questions, point out something that is puzzling or provocative and why, or explain a disagreement you have with the image or the text.
The following questions will help you converse with a multimodal text.
- What are the strengths of the text?
- What are the limitations of the text? What is puzzling or incomplete about the text’s treatment of the subject matter?
- Does the text raise questions that it does not resolve?
- What assumptions does the text make about its audience? Are these assumptions valid?
- How does the design of the image or multimodal text shape your reaction to it?
Many writers use a double-entry notebook to converse with a text and generate ideas for writing. A double-entry notebook allows you to separate what a text says and does from what a text means. To create one, draw a line down the center of a notebook page. As you record details and features of a multimodal text on the left side of the notebook page and your own responses on the right side, you can visualize the conversation as it develops.
To create a double-entry notebook electronically, you can use a table or text boxes in a word processing program.
