On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies

Winner of the 2015 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

As our field of composition studies invites students to compose with new media and multimedia, we need to ask about other possibilities for communication, representation, and making knowledge—including possibilities that may exceed those of the letter, the text based, the composed.

In this provocative look at how composition incorporates new forms of media into actual classrooms, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue persuasively that composition's embrace of new media and multimedia often makes those media serve the rhetorical ends of writing and composition, as opposed to exploring the rhetorical capabilities of those media. Practical employment of new media often ignores their rich contexts, which contain examples of the distinct logics and different affordances of those media, wasting the very characteristics that make them most effective and potentially revolutionary for pedagogy. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies urges composition scholars and teachers to become aware of the rich histories and rhetorical capabilities of new media so that students' work with those media is enlivened and made substantive.

Jonathan Alexander is professor of English, campus writing coordinator, and director of the Center for Excellence in Writing and Communication at the University of California, Irvine.

Jacqueline Rhodes is professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino, where her scholarly work focuses on intersections of rhetoric, materiality, and technology.