Dear Reader,

From 2013 to 2018, Elon University campaigned its “Writing Excellence Initiative,” seeking to enhance the teaching and learning of writing across Elon’s entire campus. As a part of this initiative, Elon’s Center for Writing Excellence began the Multimodal Writing Contest in 2018 as a way to highlight the importance of multimodal writing, express how valued multimodal writing is to the university-wide community, and celebrate student’s projects and talents.

Over the past five years, the contest has had hundreds of entries sharing projects from a variety of genres. Whether it be health science presentations, historical times, or fun children’s content, there’s a space for any project you could think of. Just think…there’s so many different ways to share your message through visuals, audio, text, infographics, and more. Multimedia spans a wide variety of fields. For all the business  majors, communications people, and our friends in arts and sciences we have some news for you— multimedia is in your field. Multimedia is everywhere…your phone, television, school, work, and even on social media.We had a few goals in mind as we designed a website for the Multimodal Writing Contest. We wanted to make sure student’s work and their creative sides are shown off by collecting all the projects and putting them in one central location for people to see. The possibilities for ideas are endless. Besides, it’s not fun seeing the same type of project over and over.

By giving simple yet detailed explanations of every aspect of the Multimodal Writing Contest, we hope to create a buzz, attract more people, and rope them into the contest. And why not? There’s so many benefits for you… it’s a win-win. As editors, we want to be able to showcase excellent work from the students here at Elon University.

Why should you care about us editors, though? We are completing the Multimedia Authoring minor here and have learned a wide range of skills including visual design, data visualization, analyzation of audiences, and professional writing skills. As we graduate, we look forward to taking these skills out into the real world to our “adult jobs,” and knowing we are fully prepared to take on whatever comes at us. We often create projects just like the ones submitted in this competition and believe it is a truly great opportunity that students should be taking advantage of.

Great multimodal projects really dig deep and go beyond just a basic document of text. They emphasize the importance of diverse perspectives, variety of styles and mediums, and how important it is to learn a range of skills that will benefit you in the future. Multimodal projects have a way of really targeting the audience, as design, tone, and linguistic choices have a large impact on the effect of the work. It is these steps that go above and beyond, highlighting truly great multimodal work.

If you’re not yet convinced on how great this contest is and the beauty of multimedia, take a look at the rest of our page.

Why not take a stab at it?

Sena Cadmus ‘23 Strategic Communications & Media Analytics; Multimedia Authoring Minor

Joanna Dwyer ‘24 Journalism; Multimedia Authoring, Sport Management, and Professional Writing Studies Minors

Trey Mead ‘23 Strategic Communications & Cinema & Television Arts; Multimedia Authoring Minor

Greg Seelagy ‘24 Creative Writing; Multimedia Authoring and Music Minors

Erin Shugar ‘23 Strategic Communications, PWR & Multimedia Authoring Minors

Imani Spence ‘23 Media Analytics; Multimedia Authoring Minor