By Katia Elena Carlo Berríos
ENC1136: Multimodal Writing/Digital Literacy (Spring 2021)
Instructor: Brandon Murakami
This course focuses on the topic of “digital literacy” and its relationship to multimodal composition, widely defined. As an alternative to ENC1102 (“Rhetoric and Academic Research”), the second course in UF’s sequence of “First-Year Writing,” students work to compose well-researched, creative, and thoughtful pieces while being attentive to the affordances and constraints of each of the mediums they synthesized. There are three different composition projects, though I provide examples from only one here: the Image/Text assignment.
Positioned between the “traditional” Digital Technology Research Paper and the Audio/Video assignment, the Image/Text assignment asks students to explore the relationship between alphanumeric text and the static image to compose their own imagetext. This imagetext could take the form of a picturebook, a comic, infographics, or a zine, to name a few. At the same time, students were asked to “translate” academic research and jargon for their target audience—often children or the general public—while employing their knowledge of the elements and principles of visual and graphic design, color theory, and composition theory.
Katia Elena Carlo Berríos is an undergraduate Digital Arts and Science major whose academic interests include animation, film, and storytelling.