About The Website

 ESL Multimodal Writing and Composition (EMWC) is a site created with ESL students in mind. It is a multi-tool created by ESL students for ESL students. The idea behind the website is to accumulate all potentially useful tools that make composing and writing practices smoother for international students writing in English for American universities and other institutions from English-speaking countries. Our purpose in putting this site together is to help out other students, such as ourselves, who felt shame in not being able to compose in the same ways their American classmates did.

But why? Because not all of us share the same cultures, knowledge, or practices, but we all share a sense of otherness that ties into our experiences learning in a new place. A sense of dépaysement —warm and inviting, cold and alienating, daring and exciting, all at once. It's that transition period we're all warned about when we choose to seek our education abroad. And this process of acclimation doesn't have to be complicated. We all compose multimodally —international or not. We all get a little help from new media and all the emerging tools technology has contributed to education. It is nothing to be ashamed of.

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How to navigate the website and its five segments: easy access to all. From the homepage, you can get to all the important pages and information we offer from two places: four squares at the bottom of the page and the menu bar at the top right. The menu remains in place throughout all our pages, and the search bar above it will direct you to anything you can't find immediately. The About Us page is this page, where we briefly introduce our site and its purpose. Our Mission is where our Manifesto and raison d'être lives —without it and its delineation of the importance of multimodal composing for ESL writing, EMWC wouldn't exist. In The Tools you'll find all of our current recommendations for tools available and readily accessible to make writing and composing an easier, cleaner process. Along with each description of the tools, there'll be one or more links to pages that allow the use of these tools. This page will be regularly updated with tools we and others (including you) find along the way. The Research page is where we compile some pedagogical scholarly work and theories centered on multimodal composing and learning. Then, if you so wish, you can continue exploring through the 'more' tab, where you'll find the FAQ page with the answers this page was unable to provide and a space to leave questions we couldn't foresee. Through 'more' you can also access the flyer that started this journey, as well as a forum to chat and connect with other students across the world experiencing similar things.

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In creating this site, we aim to build a community of people who encourage and help each other. A community that brings out the best in each other —the best people, the best writers, the best composers.

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We hope this site helps educators and students alike. Use all the tools you need, and compose some good stuff. Good luck!