By Irfan Rifai

In time when people receive major, frequent exposures to videos and images, composition classes in all schooling contexts are pushed to adjust with new pedagogy and outcomes to meet the suddenly new public expectations . The reason to the adjustment is simple : people have learned new ways to accept and make meanings. So, instead of simply relying on texts to deliver messages, the visual means of message delivery have become a common practice.

With the thought in mind, I asked two group of students taking Academic Writing 101 class to each produce a six-word story as an opening activity to the one semester course. The majority of students came up with interesting stories written in, as the name suggested it, six words. From my subjective perspectives, some of the stories written are on a par with that of Ernest Hemingway : “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

To spice things a little, I also pushed students to transduce their stories into a different mode. Here are some of the works that they have produced.

 

The words interpret the image or vice versa?
The words interpret the image or vice versa?

 

Individual styles and preferences are seen clearer in multimodal work. Don;t you think so?
Individual styles and preferences are seen clearer in multimodal work. Don’t you think so?

 

Simplicity in Richness
Simplicity in Richness

It would take both hard skills and soft skills to transduce ( change of modes) or transform ( change of meaning) stories into different modes. I would explore the technical skills, students’ creative process and its impacts on meaning making in my next article. [irf]