The timeline above, punctuated by authors with very different concerns and audiences, is meant to quickly convey the multiplying and accelerating calls to expand models and practices of writing beyond the academic essay to account for, apparently, the reality of composition “in the wild” (Soliday, 2011), which has evolved in academic and professional contexts as a result of changes in the technological environment. Most of these calls intensify and narrow arguments made by pioneers in the field of computers and writing that composition pedagogy and research risked becoming “increasingly irrelevant” (Selfe, 2004, p. 72) unless they addressed the “tectonic change” (Yancey, 2004, p. 298) literate culture was experiencing. In recent years, the field of writing studies seems to be achieving consensus around the idea that the alphabetic academic essay should be, if not abandoned entirely, then at least demoted from its traditional role as the exclusive standard and focus of literacy instruction.

Many of these arguments for multimodal composition becoming part of the curriculum have centered on first-year composition (FYC) classrooms. They have emerged from a couple of main exigencies. One of these exigencies, elaborated by Banks (2016) in the article quoted above, is the imperative to recognize the multiple literacies that diverse students bring to college classrooms from worlds more rich, authentic, and expansive than the disciplined communicative practices of the academy. Another exigence is the responsibility of educators to prepare students with “a full quiver of semiotic modes from which to select” (Selfe, 2009, p. 645) the relevant means of persuasion to meet the ever-changing demands of a rapidly globalizing and digitizing world. This is the argument advanced by Lauer and Brumberger (quoted above)—since writing in the workplace can no longer be said to resemble the writing assigned in schools, our curricular paradigm must be revised.

But one of FYC’s other explicit or implied exigencies, one that is often imagined to conflict with the two others described above, is to “prepare students to write the genres of the academy” (Wardle, 2009, p. 778). Not everyone sees multimodality as separate from writing at the university, though. A number of scholars of writing in the disciplines as well as technical and scientific communication (whose research is summarized more thoroughly in the following section) have suggested that multimodal composition is in fact quite central to the work of many academic disciplines. Some have gone so far as to say that the essay is on the verge of being pushed aside in favor of other research genres. Somers (2018), for instance, writing for The Atlantic, declares dramatically that “the scientific paper is obsolete,” soon to be replaced by computational notebooks capable of dynamically crunching numbers and representing the visual thinking researchers in STEM fields rely on. Somers also equivocates, though, noting that similar pronouncements have been made for decades while in reality scientific “papers” seem to have changed little besides the fact that they are now generally accessible as PDFs online.