This week made me think more intentionally about the choices that go into communication, especially when something looks simple on the surface.
Social media posts can feel casual or spontaneous, but when I started analyzing them in terms of audience, purpose, context, and rhetorical appeals, it became much easier to see how deliberate those choices can actually be.
One of the things I noticed while analyzing the Tony Robbins post was how much the effectiveness of the message depended on specific details. Rather than simply saying that a fundraiser was successful, the post used numbers, images, emotional language, and the context of the event to demonstrate the scale of what had happened. The post was not only sharing information. It was also celebrating the people involved, building credibility, creating an emotional response, and encouraging others to feel connected to the larger purpose. Looking at the post this way made me realize that rhetorical choices often overlap rather than fitting neatly into one category.
This module also made me think about my own work in the course. I created Literacy in Progress as a website for my reflections and other course work rather than treating each assignment as something completely separate. That choice has become part of how I am thinking about multimodal writing. The writing still matters, but so do the structure, navigation, visual presentation, organization, and experience of the person reading it. Even deciding where something belongs on the site or how someone moves between pages is a communication decision.
I came into this course already familiar with thinking about audiences in professional communication, but this week gave me more precise language for understanding why particular messages work. I am beginning to see multimodal writing less as adding visuals to traditional writing and more as considering the entire experience of a message. The platform, design, words, images, audience, and purpose all work together.