This study of multimodal composing in the classroom was shaped by the conceptual school of thought that society is in the process of a watershed transition in terms of the dominant forms of meaning-making in communication. As one of that school’s most influential scholars, Gunther Kress has argued that transition involves a historic movement beyond the way alphabetic Western cultures have been dominated for centuries by writing as the main carrier of meaning toward an increasing reliance on image and multimodality. In multimodal communication, modes such as image and color work together – often with words – to semiotically enhance potentials for meaning. This study utilized emojis – a set of small images, symbols, or icons that can be added to electronic messages – in structured multimodal writing exercises, not as an object of study in and of themselves but to leverage their function as a familiar, standardized, and easily utilized form of multimodal communication. Messaging that combines words and emojis represents signs that multimodally utilize writing, image, and color in exactly the way Kress conceptualized it. The design of this study sought to reveal useful patterns regarding how students multimodally compose using the semiotic communication tools that visual elements like emojis represent – through exercises aimed at heightening the students’ consciousness of multimodal communication and generating relevant data on such composition efforts. The study also was designed as a proposed response to the particular way analysis of multimodality in the classroom has been characterized by Kress and others as inherently and structurally challenging. The findings point to considerable potential meaning enhancement through multimodal composing. However, they offer less support for multimodal messaging involving images as necessarily superior to words-only messaging in effectively conveying meaning, as some literature on the subject suggests. Taken as a whole, implications from this study provide considerable encouragement that the sorts of exercises administered with the study participants can potentially help other students enhance their writing multimodally – by utilizing words and emojis in exercises aimed at heightening their consciousness of multimodal communication.