Multimodality In Tourism Websites: Asheville Versus Charlotte

Tourism websites promote and enable the potential tourist to obtain information about a particular destination. Their role in facilitating communication and trade between the destination and the potential tourist lend them to study in the field of professional writing. Tourism websites for North Carolina cities have not been analyzed at all and little research has focused on multimodality in tourism websites. According to Cynthia Selfe and Pamela Takayoshias’ definition that will be used in this paper, multimodal texts “exceed the alphabetic and may include still and moving images, animations, color, words, music, and sound” (as cited in Lauer, 2009). The following study addresses how multimodality functions in the official tourism websites of Asheville, NC (exploreasheville.com) and Charlotte, NC (charlottesgotalot.com). To do this, the data were analyzed according to (1) multimodality types, (2) Brown’s (2017) motion techniques, and (3) Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) realizations. The study concludes that both websites employ multimodality in different ways. The pages with the highest and most diverse forms of multimodality are pages of importance. These pages emphasize the cities’ special attractions, like the culinary and music scenes for Asheville and the sports scene for Charlotte.