I was able to snag quite a few multimodal texts from my backpack as I have the unfortunate habit of lugging half my school supplies around with me at all times.

• Grants and Proposals Textbook (L, V)
• Learning Web Design (L, V)
• Clash of Clans (L, V)
• Yik Yak (L, V)
• Psych, the iPhone game(V, S)
• Tiny wings (V, S, G)
• Water bottle (L)
• W-2 (L, V)
• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves (L,)
• Bag of almonds (L, V,)
• DITA Workbooks (L, V)
• Spider, iPhone app (A, V, S, G)

Out of all my apps, the most interesting one I found to review was the game “Spider”. It uses aural effects to imitate sounds of an old creaky house as you control a digital spider. The game teaches you how to control the spider through gestural motions on the phone, as you watch spider jump about and spin webs throughout the woods and indoors.None of my texts seemed to embrace all five modes though I suppose since their were some limited written instructions it could be argued that the game did have all five. What became clear was that depending on the medium of the text, there likelihood of the various modes being utilized changed. The iPhone games benefit from gestural instructions as they are dependent on a touch screen interface. The physical paper texts and books tend to rely solely on their written text with some visual embellishments. The digital applications also frequently utilized the aural capabilities of the phone to enhance the experience of the texts it contains.

The most noticeably different texts would have to be comparing the game Psych to the book I had. The book was wholly reliant on linguistic communication while the application, Psych, embraced the visual capabilities of the iphone to create a game that makes you hyper-focus on your vision as you try to tap the screen fast enough whenever a set of warping concentric circles line up just right. The image on the screen is constantly warping and changing color schemes and dimensions to try and make the game more difficult as the rotating concentric circles speed up and warp faster.

Some of these were created very recently, like my class notes and schedule. The text material were created earlier on; however, there is not a big difference between the two, as one was published/revised in 2012 and the other in 2014. Of all of these texts, aI think that hand written notes and the macbook case are the two most different modes, as the case is mostly for visual aesthetic and the notes are purely for linguistic purposes. They are also used for very different purposes, which factors into the difference.

The most notable similarity between all my texts as that they had all (more or less) been created in the past five years or so. Even within the apps and texts, I was able to see the effect modern technology is having on the advanced usage of various modes of text.

Had I been able to attend class today, I would have likely showed my nail polish mode with the class, as not many people are likely to have nail polish in their backpacks. It has a very creative visual label mode, and then it has the boring linguistic mode to explain the contents. The label is visually dynamic and interesting, and I think the class would have liked it. It utilizes modes in a way that I found interesting, especially since it is such an abstract object.