Teachers often remark that getting students to focus and fully engage in writing academic research papers is a problematic issue that occurs repeatedly. Part of the reason the issue is reoccurring could be because problems often develop very early on in the writing process, beginning when students are asked to focus their ideas, and articulate them in a concise, coherent manner. Russell Durst described the problem in this way, “The writing process can be full of pitfalls and blind alleys. Writers may stray from their initial plans; these plans may prove inadequate; or language may break down, causing a loss of coherence. Thus, writers employ a host of self-monitoring strategies in shaping a written text.” (Durst R. K., 1989, p. 340). What we can gauge from his statement is that in order to produce a good piece of academic writing, students should start with a focused argument or idea and treat that primary claim as a guide, allowing it to function as a tool to discovery. This step in the invention process can be particularly difficult for beginning writers who are learning how to adapt and succeed in the genre of academic writing, and often find themselves stuck in the beginning stages of the writing process.
The question that began to arise as I reflected on how to best aide new student writers in these first stages of writing was one that I stumbled upon when reflecting about the ways in which I write. Specifically, in the troubles I myself have encountered as I underwent this process in constructing an argument, often times it was difficult to begin writing – to narrow my topic into something I could write about, or to find that issue in the research I was interested in teasing out more. I see the same issue occur consistently in the writing classrooms I teach, especially amongst beginning writers, many of whom are encountering academic writing for the first time. My question thus became, how can students become more engaged with the material they have compiled at the beginning of the writing process to help increase engagement with the material early-on and allow for more enjoyment throughout the writing process? Furthermore, what strategies might be employed to help our students develop a deeper and richer understanding of content as they begin constructing a more focused argument? In pondering my own questions, I thought about the ways in which the integration of a multimodal composition might enhance students’ abilities to create and develop concise, focused ideas and arguments to begin working with, thereby allowing for more ease and overall success throughout the writing process. As these thoughts came into sharper focus, I set out to implement a small action research project to test my theory – that is, to see if the integration of a multimodal project really would help students enrich their thinking about an argument at the beginning of the writing process. Furthermore, I wanted to know if that investment and interest on a topic would carry over to the later stages of the actual writing process.