In her essay The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing, Cynthia Selfe discusses a variety of important points. The thing that stands out to me most in the text is the need for a variety of teaching mediums. These would include things like audio, written text, images, etc. Her focus however is the “contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression.” Put simply, this is the idea that teaching composition as a strictly written concept excludes groups who use other forms of composition, particularly aural composition. She goes on to explain that we are missing out, in terms of knowledge and in teaching, by focusing on just the written word.

This ties directly into the previous texts. All of these texts, whether they be about literacy, composition, or pedagogy, focus on the need for incorporating multiple mediums into education. The idea of multiliteracy—that we need to be literate in more than just written word—is no different than what Selfe advocated for in her essay. The final line of her essay makes this connection undeniable: “We will need all available means of persuasion, all available dimensions, all available approaches, not simply those limited to the two dimensional space of a printed page.” Despite being focus on the relationship between aural composition and written composition, Selfe ends the essay by calling for our society to embrace all possible mediums of communication. This is the exact same concept as multiliteracy.