The multimodal argument will allow you to take the work you have done in previous assignments and put it to work for a specific academic audience. The writing process is one of the most important aspects of completing this assignment because you’ll need to research, read complex sources, create an argument applicable to a specific academic audience, and consider how you can use that genre most effectively. Many of these processes we do without thinking intentionally; however, just as you’ve been practicing being intentional readers, you need to be methodical, intentional writers.

INSTRUCTORS – please see the scheduling and pacing notes before beginning this assignment.

Course objectives

Module objectives

Assignment sheet

Developing Your Argument

It’s time to think about how you can take the research you’ve done and turn it into an argument. This will require a few steps.

1. Decide which sources are the most appropriate to help you and your audience understand the topic.
2. Then, you will define your audience so that you can decide how your audience could be persuaded to care about your topic.
3. Finally, you will decide how to put your research, your knowledge about the audience, and the exigency together in a genre guided by specific expectations.

Research Focus

Focus is a word we hear a lot in writing, but it isn’t always well defined. If your composition teacher tells you that your focus is too broad or too narrow, what does that mean? Essentially, your research focus needs to be balanced; you need to have a specific context in mind, but don’t make it so specific that there is little to no information available. There are a few ways you can put boundaries around your research topic so that you aren’t trying to discuss so much information that you feel lost in front of the keyboard and that blinking cursor.

Place. Is your topic related to a specific geographical area? If you are trying to write about a topic that affects the whole world, an entire continent, or even an entire country, it might be too broad. Can you restrict your topic to how it affects people in certain regions, or contexts? For example, rather than schools, which could mean grade school, preschool, high school, and universities around the world, could you narrow your topic to American universities?

Time. Is your topic relevant now, in 2021, or was it a bigger problem in 2010? If you are researching a topic that has existed for centuries, you likely need to isolate your topic to its effects during a particular century or even decade. For example, homelessness has been a problem for a long time, but you likely don’t have the time to research the entire history of homelessness across the world.

People. Who is affected by your issue? If you can answer “everyone in the world”, you’ll need to rethink your topic. There are no issues in the world that affect everyone in the exact same way. Instead thinking about different populations of people who experience your topic in distinct ways. For example, healthcare is a popular topic. While everyone needs to think about their health, doctors, pharmacists, medical researchers, and people with chronic diseases all have different experiences with healthcare.

Cause/effect/solutions. In terms of your topic, you can categorize it into three main parts: the causes of the issue, its effects, and potential solutions (or actions people take to change the issue in some way). A topic like climate change is a good example of one where you can split the topic in this way: are you concerned about a specific effect of climate change? Or a proposed solution to one of the effects? Are you curious about some of the causes of a specific type of environmental problem?

Narrowing your research topic is a process of trial and error. Start with climate change. As a topic, it’s incredibly broad. It affects all people, has over time, around the entire world, and has hundreds of causes, effects, and solutions. Now, if we consider the criteria above – place, time, people and cause/effect/solution – we can get much closer to a realistic research topic that can be addressed in a one-semester class.

Climate change:

Place – the Pacific Ocean

Time – 2000-2021A.C.E.

People – employees at fisheries around Hawaii

Cause/effect/solution – overfishing and pollution leading to extinction or greatly reduced fish populations

By  narrowing your topic from “climate change” to “how overfishing has affected fisheries around Hawaii in the last 20 years”, your research will be much more effective, making your writing that much easier. The next step? Deciding what information you still need.

Check-in

You likely have a few sources in mind, but will need to find more. Use the following questions to help you decide what kind of sources you still need to find.

1. What have you learned about your topic so far?
2. What questions do you still have about your topic?
3. What do you think your audience will need or want to know about your topic?
4. Are there any important perspectives that your sources don’t discuss?

Find the gaps in your knowledge using the above questions. Then return to the library database to find sources that will help you answer those questions so that you can fully, effectively explain the topic and support your argument.

Developing Your Argument

Now that you have a good sense of how to focus your topic and conducted further research, it’s time to think about how you’re going to develop your argument. What is development, exactly? Think of it as making your paper longer, but without using a bunch of “fluff” or padding the assignment with unrelated information. Developing your writing requires a few different factors: understanding your audience, your topic, and your purpose.

1. What is your opinion about this topic? Why do you think this issue is important?
2. Why do you think that this issue is relevant to your audience (the CSU community)?
3. How would you describe your audience’s relationship to this issue? How are they affected by it?
4. Which sources from your research are you going to use? What did they teach you about your topic?

Check-in

• Make sure that your sources represent different perspectives. Go beyond thinking about pro/con perspectives. Instead, think about different ways in which people view and experience your topic.
  • Which perspectives are represented in your sources? Are there any you should add?
  • Do you fully understand how your audience is affected by the issue, or what they think about it? If not, you may find additional sources.
  • Are there any other sources from the previous assignment that you think could be relevant and useful in supporting their argument?

Genre & Multimodality

Genre is an important consideration no matter what purpose your writing has. We always have to be aware of what purpose we want to achieve when choosing our genre. Many genres are familiar to us and so we don’t need to think about tone, voice, or format. However, writing in an unfamiliar genre can make us realize how many of those aspects we take for granted in communications like text messages, Snapchats, and notes we take for class.

When thinking about genre, consider:

Tone: does the audience know how the author feels about the topic, or are they supposed to be objective?

Voice: does the author use first person (“I feel…”) or do they use third person (“they think that…”)? What is appropriate for this genre?

Format: does the genre use headings, footnotes, sections, chapters, or images? Does it include greetings and closings? How strictly should we adhere to the format of the genre?

Multimodality: does the genre allow the author to use modes of communication in addition to written words, like images, song, colors, or charts?

Check-in

1. Think about the genres you write in most often. List 2-3 of them.
2. What is the tone, voice, format, and modality of that genre?
3. What is your favorite genre to read? What are the characteristics of that genre?

So How Do You Choose A Genre?

Often, the genre you use is determined by your purpose. If you want to be accepted into a university program, they likely have a strict application format. If you are applying for a job, you will have to write a cover letter. Other genres, like poetry or infographics, can be a bit more flexible in their purpose and genre expectations. However, genres all have one thing in common: each genre is designed to help the author reach specific purposes. Just as you wouldn’t write your instructor a song to ask for an extension on a paper, you probably wouldn’t write an epic poem to convince your boss that you deserve a promotion.

Think back to the previous Check-in activity. What is the purpose of the genres you use most often?

The Connection Between Genre & Audience

In addition to thinking about what purpose you want to achieve, your genre will also be influenced by your audience. After all, how can your purpose for communicating succeed if your audience never reads the genre that you write?

1. What genres does my audience usually read?
2. What genres are used to discuss my topic?
3. What genres would be effective at delivering my message?
4. What multimodal elements are available in these genres?

Multimodality

Every day, we interact with multimodal texts. We have many more ways to communicate outside of the written and spoken word. Some genres only allow written or spoken words; however, many other genres allow other modes of communication.

Some common examples of modes are:

• images, color, body language, sound, music, tone, objects, clothing, charts
• Can you think of other modes?

Many academic genres rely on written text, but often, you will encounter peer-reviewed sources that use charts and graphs to communicate complex information. They serve as a quick reference, and can help the audience find and understand a large amount of data without having to read paragraphs of text explaining that data.

Read and evaluate the image below. What modalities are present? What meaning do they contribute to the image?

Check-in

1. What genre are you using for the multimodal argument?
2. What modes of communication are acceptable or expected in that genre?
3. Which modes do you think you’ll use in your project?

Understanding Your Audience

Taking a stance on what you’ve learned and communicating that to an academic audience is one of the most common experiences that college students (and instructors!) share. However, the ways in which you can be rhetorically effective depend on understanding who your audience is as a cohesive group of people with shared experiences, knowledge, or opinions about your topic.

Your purpose for this assignment is to argue that your issue is relevant and exigent to your audience. There are many issues and problems happening all around the world that we should care about, so how can you make your audience understand your issue and agree that they should give it priority?

Here are some questions you should consider when trying to decide how and why your audience should care about your issue.

1. How are they affected by your issue? If your audience is impacted negatively or positively, that will tell you a lot about their attitude towards it. Is this something that affects their lives every day, or something that they just think about every now and then?
2. If they aren’t directly affected, then who is? For example, if your topic is online or distance learning and your audience is parents, perhaps their main connection is the impact on their school-aged children. Your audience doesn’t have to be directly impacted in negative or positive ways, but they still care about your issue for some reason.
3. What are their opinions about your topic? Understanding your audience’s opinions about your issue will help you decide how to talk about it. Remember, your purpose is NOT to persuade them to think differently about the issue; your purpose is to make them understand its exigency.
4. What do they know about it? As you’ve likely read in your sources so far this semester, authors tend to give their audience a bit of context for understanding a topic. If the audience are experts in the topic, they won’t need as much context. If the audience has never heard of the topic, then they will need a lot more context explained to them before you can convince them to care about its exigency.
5. Do they have any control over the issue? This helps you understand your audience’s stake in the issue, or what they could potentially gain or lose.

Workshop & Revision

At this point in your project, you have narrowed the focus of your topic, conducted research so that you understand the topic better, decided which genre you will use to communicate with your audience, learned about your audience and how to convince them that your topic is exigent. One of the most important parts of the writing process in a research-based project is to ensure the effective, accurate use of your outside sources. This not only includes proper attribution, but using enough evidence in relevant parts of your project.

When using your sources, consider the following questions:

Relevant: is the evidence related to the claim or point you are trying to make?

Reliable: can your audience trust the evidence?

Recent: how old is the information? Has it changed since publication?

Sufficient: is there enough proof that your claims or points can be proven true?

Read the sample argument paragraph and evaluate its use of outside sources according to the criteria above:

Internet Language has allowed for the creation and helped with the development of both pop-culture and meme-culture. Many pop-culture references and countless memes created on the digital space would not have been possible without internet language. These aspects of internet language are considered hallmarks of our current generation and are encountered almost daily (both on and off the internet). In a peer-reviewed source titled “Tweet Me Slangs: A Study of Slanguage on Twitter” by Robbin Anjola, the author examines the ways in which internet language has contributed to things like slang and memes, specifically on twitter. Anjola explained in the source that “internet language is incorporating slangs which may be incomprehensible without prior knowledge of their meaning irrespective of language competence during communication on and off cyberspace” (Anjola). This essentially means that in some cases references made in person originated online and in order to understand them you must understand what internet language is and how to use it. This same idea is corroborated in the article “The Philosophy of Meme Culture” by Ayesha Habib. The author explains that “Memes of today drip with Internet-trademarked black comedy. They’re embellished with a vernacular particular to Internet-moulded youth, making them fascinating and frustrating to older generations.” (Habib). In many cases older generations lack the knowledge to understand and analyze internet memes that have become an iconic part of our culture. This is because they do not understand the basics of internet language or the meaning behind it. Habib goes on to state that “When Gen Z memes remark ‘oof’ or ‘yikes’ to the irreversibility of the Earth’s environmental damage, or express the urge to ‘yeet into the void’ to escape the harsh realities of our times, the blasé responses can be hilarious. But they also contain a blunt and powerful kind of honesty.” (Habib). In many instances research on internet language draws the conclusion that the dialect allows for a more advanced way to communicate that can be extremely meaningful and comical at the same time. It’s likely that this will become a more common occurrence as more users begin integrating into the digital space and fully utilize the benefits of internet language. In many cases understanding internet language is the barrier that divides entire demographics of people and how we perceive/react.

Suggested schedule/pacing

Of all the modules in this curriculum, this largest unit is designed to be the most flexible. Instead of being organized around weeks, we have split this module into topics.

• Scheduling. You could combine this assignment with the previous one, or merge them into one extended research project. Having the Research Report and the Multimodal Argument as separate assignments still has them scaffolding off one another, as the research completed in the first project would support the argument in the second project. In this case, the Multimodal Argument would work well after the Research Report assignment if you’d like students to use the work in that project to support the argument in this one. One benefit is that writers can focus on each aspect of the research process as a discrete activity of searching for, reading, and evaluating different types of sources before moving on to using them. Assigning the Research Report before the Multimodal Argument would allow you time during this unit to focus on multimodality, genre, argumentation, and integration of outside sources.

Merging the Research Report and the Multimodal Argument is another option. In that scenario, you could have students conduct their research with the argument in mind. Take the full five (or six) weeks to work through the research process, discuss how to choose relevant, reliable sources, how to use evidence effectively, how to focus their argument, and how to address a specific audience.

• Genre: There are multiple options in terms of the genre(s) you allow students to use. The assignment sheet is currently written to allow them options; in the past, students have chosen to complete this assignment as traditional research arguments, posters, PowerPoint presentations, infographics, and podcasts. If these options are left open, it would be important to discuss different modalities and genre expectations, as well as how audience and genre interact. 

You can also limit the genre of this assignment in order to spend more time on research processes here if you decide not to assign the research report. If you decide to merge the two assignments, we would suggest restricting the available genres for this assignment. 

Assessment notes

Many students assume that they know argumentation, and while that may be true, they may have difficulty with the specific purpose of this assignment. They aren’t developing a unique argument based on their research, but thinking about who their audience is in order to better argue the exigency of the issue to that audience.

We have restricted to purpose of this assignment to arguing about exigency because:

1. Students will develop original, focused arguments in CO2, and
2. The emphasis of this assignment is about choosing and using research effectively. They must make informed decisions about their research and then be able to paraphrase, direct quote, cite, and integrate outside sources effectively.

In order to meet course objectives, students can still think of this as an argument – an argument in which they must think about how and why their specific audience should care about their issue, rather than taking for granted that a topic like hunger or homelessness is equally concerning to all people in the world.