This study explores the pedagogical effectiveness of assignments developed for a first-year composition course to encourage reflexive reading habits that can aid students in the writing process. Students in this course were asked to articulate the connections they found between multimodal texts of their own choosing and texts assigned by their instructors. These assignments were designed to discourage problematic deferent and/or self-referent student reading approaches where students are either too deferential to the authors of texts or too myopic and dismissive of authors' ideas. At the end of the course, a number of students reported that learning how to juxtapose multimodal texts and trace ideas from one genre to another made it easier for them to identify meaningful research topics.