Our focus as a department at New Mexico State University and a statewide university system is on the practical, rhetorical situations and outcomes of communication. Multimodal composition will help students to:

1. "Practice writing processes, from inventions, drafting, and revising to editing and polishing" by placing these traditional activities in different media and multimodal contexts. Video and audio projects, for example, provide students with an opportunity to practice careful revision and editing in modes that often highlight sloppy or thoughtless work.

2. "Read actively and think critically" by growing notions of text. In many defintions of multimodal new media, the acts of reading and writing are conflated as the readers of the texts actively participate in their creation and evolution; it's almost impossible to passively consume a multimodal text. Further, the act of representing an argument in non-alphabetic media encourages a further step in the critical thinking processes, one which challenges previously held beliefs and assumptions. Critical thinking can be encouraged by the scope of the assignment.

3. "Use writing to persuade, inform, and engage an audience through considered and supported thesis development" by extending the concerns of audience beyond the instructor. While not automatic to collaborative multimodal texts (of course, it's not automatic in alphabetic texts either...), considered and supported thesis development is often, as this objective implies, a function of audience. Providing an other-than-teacher audicence, changes the concerns and parameters of thesis development. Additionally, informing and engaging audiences will be of key importance to the presentation of the multimodal text. While alphabetic texts consist of a granted format, multimodal texts will attempt at engagement and information in novel and multiple forms.

4. "Explore new methods of academic inquiry, rhetorical analysis, and argumentation" by offering students new modes in which to pursue and present their work. The "new methods" referred to can easily be satisfied by multimodal texts, and the assignments can structure student engagement with "academic inquiry, rhetorical analysis, and argumentation." In addition, by emphasizing these concerns on more dimensions than occurs in alphabetic texts, the task becomes both more complicated and more relevant to a life lived in a multimodal world.

5. "Develop academic research abilities" both in the content of multimodal texts and in their creation. "Academic research abilities" no longer refers to a memorization of the Dewey Decimal system, but instead to the complexity of acquiring and analyzing the incredible number of texts housed in libraries and in databases. Familiarity with digital research is of utmost importance to writing traditional researched essays. Research for multimodal texts, again, will only add to the complexity of the encounter. Collaborative writing will also give students practice researching in collaboration, sharing information, information gathering tips, and acting as consistent rhetorical analysts for their own and others' work.

Designing multimodal composition assignments for your students not only satisfies and often exceeds the objectives of our department and the state, but works to actually prepare your students for their civic, economic, and social lives. There is no doubt that composition instructors already provide a great deal of ethical education of the utmost importance to a democracy. There is also no doubt, however, that the mode of individual, alphabetic composition is quickly becoming irrelevant. Multimodal composition brings us and our students the best of tradition and the opportunities of the digital world.