Despite spending a lot of time exploring multimodality in academic communication, I never took the 'W' in WOVEN for granted. One of my strategies for standing out in discussion posts was to start with a gripping statement - one that does not echo the discussion question, yet manages to draw attention to the topic at the very outset.

Another consideration that I have made throughout the course was to outline, or section my body of written work well. For example, in Artifact 1, I distributed my object narrative over a number of posts and put them up in a carousel on my Home Page. 

Our third Artifact was a collective business letter of around 4000 words. We sectioned our historical narrative, archival documents, current narrative, and recommendations for future under headers which appeared on the left side of the google doc as clickable contents.

While composing my written documents, I put equal emphasis on common sense and grammatical correctness. We understand what it means to be grammatically correct, but how does common sense come into play? The latter is the consideration of the reader's perspective - what kind of a sentence would confuse a reader who is not fully cognizant of what I intend to convey? At what point is a reader likely to trail off and what can I do to reclaim attention at that point?

Let me reflect on this sentence from my objective narrative:

"The potential compromise on the esoteric practice of highly adulated Indian music due to the use of harmoniums aroused much vitriol in the national leaders and music scholars as the whole sub-continent was reaching a common consensus in fighting the colonial regime."

The sentence packs in a lot of information, but its composition makes it difficult for the reader to unpack that information. Such unsolicited effort is likely to diminish the reader's interest. After giving it more thought, I decided to rephrase the sentence as follows:

"At a time when the sub-continent was uniting against the colonial regime, the harmonium being introduced by the British, aroused much vitriol in the national leaders and music scholars who strongly pointed out the potential compromise on the intricacies of Indian classical music due to the use of harmoniums."

Despite recognizing the appeal of simpler sentences, my writing style is markedly complex - containing multiple subordinate clauses within a sentence. This is because, much of my writing skill was developed through reading newspapers that follow a 'single-sentence paragraph' format. Also, before I took my IELTS, I recall reading the rubric which indicates the use of complex structures in sentences as a marker of higher proficiency.

Given these influences, I got to explore simple sentences in this course while preparing the scripts for my oral presentations. I do not talk in carefully crafted sentences during conversations. They tend to be simply structured. Making a written work conversational was something that I observed and practiced during this course. 

More interestingly, during one of the modules, I observed how the oral mode interweaves into text and blurs the distinction between spoken and written forms. I quote from my discussion post:

"Although effective written communication, with appropriate rhetorical appeals, is the main strength of the two object lessons, careful observation reveals elements of oral, visual, electronic, and even non-verbal modes that played important roles to engage the readers in these articles. For example, "Candy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards" starts with the sentence, "If you were a child at some point in the past 70 years, odds are you played the board game Candy Land." The direct address here draws more similarity with oral communication than its written counterpart, that is, it has a feeling of personal interaction within the written framework."

Although I have been hesitant to use the second person in my artifacts, I recognize its ability to grab the attention of the audience. I will be more comfortable using this approach when I present before a group that mainly consists of my peers.

Click to read more about my strategies for development