A Bag Full of Snakes: Negotiating the Challenges of Multimodal Composition

Because of the vast changes to the communication landscape over the last two decades, along with the influence of emerging technologies on students’ writing practices, empirical studies that describe students’ experiences in multimodal composing are required to determine how the goals and practices of composition teaching might be better supported and reimagined. In response to this exigency, this article presents findings from an empirical study of graduate and undergraduate writers’ multimodal composing processes. Findings from focus group interviews and written reflections show that students’ attempts to draw on their print-based rhetorical knowledge while composing multimodally worked well when they perceived print-based and multimodal composing tasks as similar, but they faced significant difficulties when they perceived the need to adapt their print-based composing knowledge to suit new or unfamiliar aspects of multimodal composing. Specifically, students found it difficult to conceptualize an audience and negotiate the multiple semiotic resources afforded by multimodal composing. In an effort to mitigate such challenges, we provide two conceptual frameworks that help students move more fluidly between print-based and multimodal composing. These pedagogical approaches enable writing specialists to better support students’ efforts to engage successfully in multimodal composition tasks.