The Villager is the student-run online newspaper at Stevenson University. The paper is run by a class of journalism students. This paper does a wonderful job of creating an easy to navigate the website but does not have the most eye-catching material.
Mode and Affordances:
The Villager uses many different modes for its publication creating a wonderful multimodal website. They include pictures, videos, text, and hyperlinks. By creating a multimodal website it will attract the eye.
The Linguistic Mode: Looking at the linguistic mode some titles are not as clear as others and there is the occasional grammatical error.
The Visual Mode: The site contains pictures, videos, colors, and font choices. The Villager is generally inconsistent when it comes to photography on the site. I see many photographs and some are nicely photographed, most likely stock photos and others are grainy photos of sports games or events around campus. This photo was one of the four photos that scrolled on the front page of the site.
As you can see this photo is not the most eye-catching photo, the photo is blurry and unclear. By using professional-looking photographs on the front page of the site it would grab more attention to the articles. Another Visual mode is the font used on the site. The font is uniform and always consistent which makes the site look clean and put together. The only downside to this font is that the titles are in all capital letters so when one a title stated “Wellness Offers SAD and Daylight Savings Help” it looked like the wellness center was offering sad help instead of Seasonal Affective Disorder help. The awesome thing about this being an online paper is that it offers the chance to watch videos from games or events that you may have missed. The color choices for this site are green and black which fits perfectly with the audience of Stevenson students.
The Aural Mode: The Villager only has an occasional video with audio that would fit into this mode, which is very suitable for an online paper.
The Spatial Mode: The Villager has a top navigation and side navigation. This fits perfectly with the site. The layout is clear and easily navigated.
The Gestural Mode: this site is easily navigated. You have the option to use a search bar or scroll down through the articles posted.
The site has hyperlinks to other sources leading to easily find things referenced in the article. You can see in this screenshot this article has a hyperlink directly to a mug that you can purchase from the target.
The Villager has its share of affordances. The multimodal site is easy to access and easy to navigate but the site could be improved by adding better photographs and changing up the font.
Is the thesis clear and debatable. Does the author express an opinion about the site?
Yes. How the authors did a wonderful job at making the website easy to navigate, but without having eye catching material. Your opinion is clearly stated here, and is definately arguable.
Does the author analyze at least two modes? Does the author provide specific evidence of each mode?
Yes. You did a good job at providing specific evidence for the hyperlinks as well as the screenshot of the video. It would be good to include examples like this in each of the modes.
Does the author identify the affordances of this site? Do the affordances connect back to their thesis?
Yes, it was woven in throughout the post and not having a particular section.
Does the author provide screenshots that relate to the evidence provided? Is it clear why the include these specific images?
Yes, 2 screenshots. It is very clear, you introduced the screenshots and referred to them after you introduced them. This type of evidence was really helpful and made me want to read it more than I already did because of this. It made your point even more compelling just by me seeing it.