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Twisha Patel

Professor Vazquez

ENC1101 Section 601

19 June 2021

“A Bag Full of Snakes”

In the article “A Bag Full of Snakes” by Michael-John DePalma and Kara Poe

Alexander, the authors give a description of discovery from a study they directed of

undergraduate and graduate students regarding multimodal composition. The aim of these

authors is to find and know how students are capable to transfer and utilize what they already

know about traditional print, alphabetic composing and multimodal composing. For the study

and in an intention to know more about undergraduate and graduate student’s awareness

regarding their involvement in multimodal composition task, they gathered a variety of data from

them who had written multimodal and digital composition. DePalma and Alexander found out

that students strived to bring out on their rhetorical knowledge of print-based composing as they

advanced towards multimodal composing. In the same token, multimodal composing frequently

required more complex notions of audience. Furthermore, due to complexity students undergo

through exasperation, worry and apprehension of fright.

These days writing isn’t just setting words in the paper but it also includes web pages,

animation, and film. In contrast to traditional writing assignments which focuses only on text,

multimodal writing assignments asks students to add variety of media. It is very hard to decide

how to communicate keeping in mind the audience, this choice making for me is challenging.

Basically, for me rhetorical considerations like context, audience and purpose it very tough. For

multimodal text one needs to be very creative and particular about images or visual aids used.
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This thing really challenges me. Its really hard for me to figure out what visual aid I should use

to be more creative and innovative. Traditional texts are very simple and sober and proves to be

very boring at times whereas multimodal texts are immensely noticeable and grabs viewer’s

attention very easily. Multimodal texts are very common nowadays in high schools and

universities. For skilled multimodal compositions, students has to have textual knowledge that is

how to convey information through text but also should have technological knowledge and skills

required to build unique digital media productions. After reading about composing multimodal

texts, I now have a clear idea about how to actually create a multimodal composition. In the

article, several problems faced by undergraduate students while composing multimodal text were

discussed. This helped me to be aware about those little things. Due to multimodal mediums, my

assignments can become more attractive, interesting and easy to understand.

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Works Cited

DePalma, Michael-John, and Kara Poe Alexander. “A Bag Full of Snakes.” Writing about

Writing, 4th ed., edited by Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, Bedford/St. Martin’s,

2019, pp. 174-203.

WORD COUNT: 448words