A Reflection on Jody Shipka and Multimodal Texts

On the 26th of October, Jody Shipka, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, came to Florida State University to speak to it’s students. Her talk, which was titled “Composing Not Knowing” spoke of creating texts based solely on understanding the work as opposed to focusing on the outcome. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the talk, but I did read Shipka’s work: Negotiating Rhetorical, Material, Methodological, and Technological Difference: Evaluating Multimodal Designs.

Most interestingly, not three pages into the text I began to notice the similarities between Shipka’s teaching style and that of my English professor for the very class that I began writing in this blog for. For the most part, my work for my other classes, be it English or criminology, focuses on a style that is referred to as “essay writing as usual” (Steal 206) and shies away from creative composing outside of the realm of MLA formatting. While I have written essay-like pieces in this particular English course, each paper has been accompanied by artifacts- be it actual objects or simulations of these objects- which initially challenged me. Writing a work and incorporating an object into it is no easy feat, but in doing so, I have developed both my analytical skills as well as my writing skills in general.

Another strong point made by Shipka is that of the association between the term multimodal and digital media and the detrimentality that stems from this association. Shipka describes this by stating that “... the tendency to use terms like “multimodal” as synonyms for digitized products and processes will mean that the yet-to-be-imagined hybrids that Russel Wiebe and Robert S. Dornsife Jr. reference… will be, provided that they have not already been, severely limited by the texts, tools, and processes associated with digitization.” Before having this point brought to my attention, I was under the impression that the terms were synonymous, though after reading about other forms of multimodal texts like the child shaper and the wine bottle, I am aware that not all multimodal texts are digital- they are simply something other than words on an eight by eleven piece of paper.