I never realized all the different random things I carried with me in my bookbag until today. When I went to look for multimodal texts, I found some interesting items. Last spring, I went to Italy and realized that I never cleaned out my book bag after that trip. I found maps, train tickets, plane tickets, museum passes, and other items that are multimodal in my bag. These are some of the items I found with indicators of which modes they utilize:

• novel: Life after Life – L, V, S
• informational booklet – L, V
• planner – L, V, S
• Starbucks cup – V, S, L
• hotel/museum passes – V, L,
• coupon book – V, S, G, L
• train tickets – V, S, L
• plane tickets – V, S, L
• punch card – V, S, G, L
• promotional button – V, S
• map – V, S
• playing cards – V, S
• youtube video – L, V, S, A, G

The one text that I have that uses all five modes is the Youtube video pulled up on my laptop. Since two of the modes are gestural and aural, some form of digital technology is necessary to utilize all five modes. The music video uses linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural modes to create the overall effect.

Since most of my items are not digital, they mainly use the linguistic, visual, and spatial modes. They use color, language, white space, and design for each item’s individual purpose.

The novel and the map are probably the most different from each other. While the novel is simple in its design and mainly utilizes language, the map is more visual based with minimal text.

The plane tickets, train tickets, and museum passes have the most in common because they all utilize similar modes for similar purposes.