Academic Paper
An academic paper may seem like a strange multimodal project to talk about. Many people may not even think about a paper as multimodal because the term "multimodal" is often linked with digital projects (such as a video essay), and that's exactly why I want to talk about the ways that academic papers. On this page, I discuss the modes of communication academic papers engage in, the rhetorical situation of an academic paper, how to use examples from film in your academic paper, how to make your paper accessible, and a few suggestions on writing an academic paper.
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Modes
Technically, any paper is multimodal because it uses linguistic, visual, and spatial modes of communication through the use of visual words that are spaced in very intentional ways. For example, think about the use of paragraph breaks and then tabs at the beginning of every paragraph. This is a spatial convention that helps break ideas into manageable chunks. This is a convention that we're taught very early in our writing careers, and it's also a complex combination of linguistic (the words we're using), visual (the physical words on a page) and spatial (the space before the beginning of each paragraph) modes of communication.
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Rhetorical Situation
Most academic papers exist, unsurprisingly, in academia: in a classroom, in published scholarship, etc. Academic papers do circulate, among scholars, among classmates, between writers and editors and advisors. However, they often don’t reach a terribly wide audience. If you’re writing a paper for a class, it might not leave the classroom, no matter how it great it is, and, even when it’s published in an academic journal, that’s still a very limited audience compared to something like the virality we see on something like YouTube. That's not necessarily a bad thing; you just need to think about how people will be reading your paper. If you're writing it for a class, for example, your teacher and classmates will have a basic understanding of the concepts you've covered in class, so you don't have to go in-depth into those. On the other hand, if you wanted to publish your paper as an article, you might have to explain some of those comments. As always, just think about who your audience is and what they need to make sense of your argument.
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Examples
Depending on your audience's knowledge of your film, you may need to describe your film more or less. Description can be a great tool to let your audience know what they need to know about the film in order to follow your wider ideas. However, for now, I want to focus on the use of images in papers. When discussing film, you may find yourself analyzing what a scene or person looks like or something like the use of lighting. Sometimes, describing these things with words is adequate, but you can also use images to help make your point. For example, in a paper I wrote about female body shape in animated films, I can describe a particular body shape and mention characters with those body shapes. However, if a reader does not know the character I use as an example, it can be hard to imagine the body shape, even with my description. To help clarify, I can use images that show exactly what I'm talking about:
While you can always describe images, including images like these allow your reader to see what you see so that you can concentrate on explaining your amazing ideas instead of trying to get to the same basic understanding about what is happening in the film you're talking about.
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Accessibility
While these images can be useful in illustrating your ideas, you should keep in mind that not everyone will be able to see at the same capacity. Any time that you include images, you need to include a description. This is helpful for several reasons: text readers (tools that read digital words aloud for blind people) cannot read an image, so anyone who uses a text reader needs a description in order to get the benefit of the image; images may be difficult to see, so a description may be necessary just to make meaning out of the image; and a person who doesn’t know your text may not know what they’re looking at or how it relates to what you’re talking about. For example, if someone was reading my paper on body shapes and didn’t know any of the characters, they wouldn’t know which bodies corresponded to which character and thus to the body shape they’re supposed to be explaining. For these reasons, it’s important that you include description of any image you include in your paper.
Suggestion
My biggest suggestion for you when using examples in an academic paper is to avoid clutter. Images can liven up an academic paper, but that is not their purpose; they should be there solely to help further explain your main ideas. Deciding if images are necessary often comes down to a consideration of reader and text. Does your reader need to see this image to understand what you are saying? For example, look at these two examples of the same page in my paper on body shapes:
A draft page from one of my academic papers which has six images, three on the left (Mulan, Mrs. Incredible, and Ariel) and three on the right (Penny, Tiana, and Chel) and is almost unreadable because the images crowd the text out.
A page from one of my own academic paper drafts with four pictures, two on each side. The pictures are of characters (Mulan and Tiana on the left and Penny and Chel on the right) that I am using as examples of the body shapes I'm discussing in the paper.
In the first example, I included two images for every body shape because I wanted to show the wide variety that existed for each shape. However, that created a silo effect where my actual writing seems squished in the middle of too many images without room for even the most basic captions. In the second example, I used two images for Straight body type, one to show a Girl’s body (Penny) and one to show an adult woman’s body (Mulan), but only one image for each of the other shapes. I needed to demonstrate how the Straight body type looks different at different ages because that difference is part of my argument later on. Even if these images take up space, they are necessary to understand my complete argument. While I think it might be helpful to include two images of each body shape, the differences in other body types is not central to my argument and so may not be necessary. Likewise, you should choose your images carefully, keeping only the most useful examples.
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Once you choose which images to use, remember that they use both visual and spatial modes of communication, so be careful where you place the images. I have been working on the organization of the above page for months because the images are necessary but can clutter or distort the page. I have to think about how many images is too many here, even if they help me make my point, so that I design a page that is not only informative but also readable.
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Conclusion
An academic paper with images can be a great place to really explain in writing what you want to say about something filmed, using research to help you build your argument and add authority to what you’re saying. You may not have a choice when you're writing an academic paper since they are often assigned. Even so, keep in mind the ways that you can enhance a paper's multimodality with images to make your argument even stronger and more eye catching.