Convergences: Message, Method, Medium

With a unique focus on message, method, and medium, Convergences asks students to think about what, why, and how we communicate. What's the best way to tell the story of your life, through words or pictures? How would the Gettysburg Address be received if Lincoln had delivered it on PowerPoint? Why did Benetton design a marketing campaign around death row inmates? Convergences asks these questions, among others. Convergences has been put together to help students explore the many different kinds of compositions that surround them. Clusters bring together texts from multiple media and genres -- essays, advertisements, the Web, news, comics, television, and film, among others -- with a methodology to read them. And the new edition does even more to suggest a vocabulary students can use to talk about all kinds of texts, both in the book and in ix -- a ground-breaking CD-ROM exploring fundamental concepts of visual rhetoric -- that comes with every copy of Convergences.

ROBERT ATWAN is the series editor of Best American Essays and on the board of Aperture Magazine. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Kenyon Review. For Bedford/St. Martin's he has edited Our Times, Fifth Edition (1998); America Now, Fifth Edition (2005); and Ten on Ten: Major Essayists on Recurring Themes (1992). He has coedited with Donald McQuade The Writer's Presence, Fourth Edition (2003) and with Jon Roberts Left, Right, and Center: Voices across the Political Spectrum (1996).


ABOUT THE AUTHORS OF ix

KRISTIN AROLA is a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan Tech in Michigan's beautiful Upper Peninsula. Her teaching of Web design and a multimodal communications course have sparked her interest in examining how spatial categories can help us understand and teach new media texts.

CHERYL E. BALL teaches composition, Web design, and new media at Utah State University. She is co-CoverWeb editor of Kairos, an online scholarly journal and is an editorial board member of Computers and Composition Online.