Blog 7

            Genre and multimodality do not seem as closely related as what they really are. When you look at the two on the outside, we visualize genre as a limitation to the particular audience for a text and multimodality allows the audience you chose when you put multiple modes together to create a meaning. When reading Chandler’s Genre Theory, I realized that multimodality and genre have close relationship with each other and how they work. As defined in Chandler’s excerpt from Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, genres are “typical forms of texts which link kinds of producer, consumer, topic, medium, manner, and occasion.” Relating it back to multimodality, in the same way multimodality is the use of multiple modes that work together to form a type of communication that links a medium to its specific audience. Much like multimodality, genres are used in a similar way to categorize information to improve communication. Genres have many parts that work together to gather information to categorize it as well as multimodality has many modes that collaborate together to produce the meaning of something. Genres are set to please the audience that is already set for it while multimodality is able to reach the targeted audience they created with the use of modes versus trying to please the set audience like genres. The differences between a genre and multimodality are the properties that are consisted for each. In a genre, distinctive properties include a narrative, characterization, themes, setting, and iconography. On the other hand multimodality consists of modes such as color, texture, images, gestures, and layout that form the meaning of communication to the audience. The components to both of these are very different but the way they work together produce the same effect of attracting an audience or the set audience.