Purposive communication

• Types of Nonverbal Cues:

  • Kinesics: facial expressions, gestures, eye movement, posture, rate of walk
  • Paralinguistics: variations in the voice
  • Proxemics: use of space and distance
  • Haptics: different types of touching
  • Clothing & Artifacts: appearance and style
  • Color: variations in clothing and environmental colors
  • Chronemics: using time to communicate
• Multimodal Literacy focuses on understanding different ways of knowledge, representations, and meaning-making by investigating semiotic resources like language, gesture, and images co-deployed across various modalities
• A multimodal text combines two or more modes to express meaning, such as a poster combining written text with still images and spatial design
• In multimodal texts, "mode" refers to the type of communication used, like spatial, linguistic, visual, gestural, or aural
• Media refers to the means through which a text reaches its audience, incorporating several modes, like a song having words and audio, or a video including gestures and spatial arrangement
• Affordances are the unique features of a selected media that a creator can use when creating in that medium, like hyperlinks and visual images in a website, or time and movement in a video
• Genres are divisions of media based on anticipated audiences, each with a set of conventions, like the genre of a newspaper comic strip having a series of three frames with a punch line in the final frame
• The rhetorical situation considers the specific time, location, and audience for which each multimodal work was written, taking into account decisions based on the author, genre, audience, and context
• The author of a multimodal work is the creator, but in some cases, like advertisements, the author may be unknown, and the implied author can be considered as the company authorizing the advertisement
• Paralinguistics


  • How words are spoken, variations in the voice
• Proxemics


  • How space and distance are used
• Kinesics


  • Facial expressions, gestures, eye movement, posture, rate of walk
• Clothing & Artifacts


  • Appearance and style
• Haptics


  • Different types of touching
• Color


  • Variations in clothing and environmental colors
• Chronemics


  • Using time to communicate