Sound engineering: Toward a theory of multimodal soundness

The activity-based multimodal theory of composing presented here offers us a way to better understand how, when, and why students might choose to explore the affordances of sound (oral, aural) in their work. Importantly, however, insofar as it resists attempts to bracket off individual senses and the uptake of select semiotic resources, it presents a more robust, integrated approach to theorizing, researching, and teaching multimodal production, one that facilitates the move toward multimodal soundness. An activity-based multimodal approach to composing provides us, but perhaps more importantly still provides students, with strategies for attending to the complex ways that a greater variety of senses, semiotic resources, and rhetorical positionings might be taken up and brought together, if only briefly, and if only in sound-for-now ways, to help them accomplish specific kinds of work in specific contexts. To illustrate how an activity-based multimodal theory of composing achieves these ends, I present two accounts of first-year composition students who explored sound's potential in their work after determining that the uptake of sound could help them, at least in part, accomplish the work they hoped to do.