Reading My Own
Design

Writing my multimodal analysis made me look at my own website differently. When I built My Literacy, In Progress, I wanted a place where my reflections could live together and where readers could see my thinking change. Analyzing it required me to ask a harder question: What does the design encourage readers to believe about that change? I knew what I intended the site to communicate. This assignment helped me recognize that intention and interpretation do not automatically line up.

One of my biggest takeaways was the difference between identifying a design choice and explaining what it does. I could point out contrast, alignment, proximity, and repetition, but naming those principles was only the beginning. Dr. Foster’s feedback pushed me to explain why each one mattered to my argument. The contrasting treatment of “In Progress,” for example, makes change part of the reader’s first impression. Repeated layouts give readers a stable structure for comparing different reflections. I began to understand these choices as ways of directing attention and shaping interpretation.

Module Five gave me the clearest example of how different modes work together. In “Space Is Part of the Message,” the distance between the title and the opening paragraph lets readers experience separation before the writing explains it. The space participates in the argument. That realization helped me understand why multimodal composition involves more than adding a graphic to a finished paragraph. Words, images, and arrangement can change what each other communicates.

The analysis also made me more critical of choices I had considered straightforward. Putting the newest reflection first seemed like a practical way to keep the site current. However, that order gives my latest understanding the most prominent position. Readers may encounter earlier reflections through the lens of what I know now and treat those entries as incomplete steps toward a better answer. That creates a tension with my goal of presenting learning as open exploration. A route that begins with Module One, or an option to read chronologically, could give the starting questions more room to matter.

The Patterns page raised a similar issue. I wanted its indicators to help readers notice changes across modules, but the bars can look like measurements even though they represent subjective observations. Explaining that they are “observations, not evaluations” acknowledges that limitation. It does not guarantee that someone scanning the page will notice the explanation. Dr. Foster’s question about that disclaimer made me consider how much work I was asking a small piece of text to do. In future revisions, I want to bring the qualification closer to the indicators and connect those indicators more directly to examples from the reflections.

Working with scholarly sources helped me develop these questions further. The research gave me ways to think about reading paths, relationships among modes, and the appearance of certainty in visual displays. It also made me more careful about separating an interpretation from a claim about actual readers. I can explain how an arrangement invites a particular reading. Without evidence from readers, I cannot assume that everyone experiences it that way.

Finally, analyzing a September 27 snapshot taught me that a living website needs a clear boundary when it becomes an object of study. Keeping an early reflection online preserves that writing, but it does not necessarily preserve the design surrounding it when it first appeared. Later entries can also change how earlier ones are understood. My conclusions describe a particular arrangement at a particular time.