Re-Inventing Digital Delivery for Multimodal Composing: A Theory and Heuristic for Composition Pedagogy

•Recast Porter's theory of digital delivery theory as a heuristic for digital multimodal composing•Show how first-year students engage with the heuristic to produce video projects from a classroom study•Present a re-modification of the theory as a composition theory and pedagogy for teaching digital composition

This essay recasts James E. Porter's topoi for digital delivery theory as a pedagogical heuristic that guides students to reconsider delivery throughout the process of composing a multimodal video in first-year writing. The article showcases students’ engagement with the fifth canon. It reports the findings from a pilot classroom study examining the affordances and limitations of the heuristic by three teacher-researchers, offers pedagogical implications, and presents a re-modification of Porter's topoi for different situated uses. Through examining students’ uses of the digital delivery heuristic for video composing, four interrelated finding strands were discovered: interdependency of the topoi and rhetorical canons, rhetorical and ethical use of multimedia resources, identification across differences and commonalities, and reinscription and norming. The article makes explicit the dynamic, interactive, and recursive nature of delivery in multimodal writing and resituates digital delivery as a composition theory and pedagogy for teaching multimedia composition.