In comparison with traditional essays, multimodal essays have emerged quite recently as a distinct genre. As a writer, you’ll have a great deal of freedom about how to pursue your purpose, adopt your role, address your readers, and adapt to the context in which your essay will be written and read. Perhaps the best example of this is the wide range of materials you can use as evidence in your essay. You should consider not only the information, ideas, and arguments found in your sources but also how your readers will respond to your sources. If your goal is to inform your readers, for example, you might find that one type of medium is more effective than another because it contains more information.

Context also plays an important role in your choice of evidence. If you know that your readers are likely to be reading your essay on a device with a small screen or a slow connection, you might choose an audio clip or an image rather than a video clip because it will open more quickly. Similarly, if you are uploading your essay to a course management system, you might have to work within particular file size limitations. If you cannot upload a large file, you might choose smaller images or use a smaller, lower-quality audio clip instead of a larger video file. Or, rather than importing the video into your essay, you might upload it to YouTube and link to it from the essay.

Even though your readers might not have encountered multimodal essays before, they will have some expectations about design and writing conventions. At a minimum, they will expect you to provide a linear document that contains one or more types of media; uses fonts, colors, shading, borders, and rules consistently and effectively; and is designed to be viewed on a computer screen or tablet. If you develop a lengthy essay, such as the multimodal essay created by Tanya Patel of the University of Texas at Austin, your readers will also expect you to provide navigation tools, such as tables of contents and page links, that will allow them to move easily from one part of the essay to another.