"Strategies for writing center directors and tutors working with writers whose texts are visual, technological, creative, and performative--strategies most useful for writers and how tutors can develop a better sense of multimodal composing and practices and the relationship between rhetorical choices, design thinking, and technological awareness"--Provided by publisher.

Multimodal Composition gives instructors a starting point for rethinking the kinds of texts they teach and produce. Chapters take up fundamental questions, such as What is multimodal composition, and why should I care about it? How do I bring multimodal composition into the classroom? How do I use multiple modes in my scholarship? With practical discussions about assessing student work and incorporating multiple modes into composition scholarship, this book provides a firm foundation for graduate teaching assistants and established instructors alike.

To many academics, composition still represents typewritten texts on 8.5" x 11" pages that follow rote argumentative guidelines. In Toward a Composition Made Whole, Jody Shipka views composition as an act of communication that can be expressed through any number of media and as a path to meaning-making. Her study offers an in-depth examination of multimodality via the processes, values, structures, and semiotic practices people employ every day to compose and communicate their thoughts. Shipka counters current associations that equate multimodality only with computer, digitized, or screen-mediated texts, which are often self-limiting. She stretches the boundaries of composition to include a hybridization of aural, visual, and written forms. Shipka analyzes the work of current scholars in multimodality and combines this with recent writing theory to create her own teaching framework. Among her methods, Shipka employs process-oriented reflection and a statement of goals and choices to prepare students to compose using various media in ways that spur their rhetorical and material awareness. They are encouraged to produce unusual text forms while also learning to understand the composition process as a whole. Shipka presents several case studies of students working in multimodal composition and explains the strategies, tools, and spaces they employ. She then offers methods to critically assess multimodal writing projects. Toward a Composition Made Whole challenges theorists and compositionists to further investigate communication practices and broaden the scope of writing to include all composing methods. While Shipka views writing as crucial to discourse, she challenges us to always consider the various purposes that writing serves.

This book on multimodal composition is designed to help teachers of English composition expand the modalities on which they and their students draw, to go beyond the limits of texts that rely primarily on words, and to enjoy exploring the affordances - the special capacities - of video, image and sound. The book offers faculty practical help on creating multimodal assignments and working within digital composing environments. There are sample essays, advice on intellectual property concerns, sample worksheets and forms, explanations of technical terms, and useful advice about hardware, software, and digital recording equipment.

While traditional writing is typically understood as a language based on the combination of words, phrases, and sentences to communicate meaning, modern technologies have led educators to reevaluate the notion that writing is restricted to this definition. Exploring Multimodal Composition and Digital Writing investigates the use of digital technologies to create multi-media documents that utilize video, audio, and web-based elements to further written communication beyond what can be accomplished by words alone. Educators, scholars, researchers, and professionals will use this critical resource to explore theoretical and empirical developments in the creation of digital and multimodal documents throughout the education system.

Writing Changes moves beyond restrictive thinking about composition to examine writing as a material and social practice rich with contradictions. It analyzes the assumed dichotomy between writing and multimodal composition (which incorporates sounds, images, and gestures) as well as the truism that all texts are multimodal. Organized in four sections, the essays explore • alphabetic text and multimodal composition in writing studies • specific pedagogies that place writing in productive conversation with multimodal forms • current representations of writing and multimodality in textbooks, of instructors' attitudes toward social media, and of writing programs • ideas about writing studies as a discipline in the light of new communication practices Bookending the essays are an introduction that frames the collection and establishes key terms and concepts and an epilogue that both sums up and complicates the ideas in the essays.

Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy challenges the longheld notion that the study and practice of composition has historically focused on words alone. Palmeri revisits many of the classic texts of composition theory from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, closely examining how past compositionists responded to “new media.” He reveals that long before the rise of personal computers and the graphic web, compositionists employed analog multimedia technologies in the teaching of composition. Palmeri discovers these early scholars anticipated many of our current interests in composing with visual, audio, and video texts. Using the concept of the remix, Palmeri outlines practical pedagogical suggestions for how writing teachers can build upon this heritage with digital activities, assignments, and curricula that meet the needs of contemporary students. He details a pluralist vision of composition pedagogy that explains the ways that writing teachers can synthesize expressivist, cognitive, and social-epistemic approaches. Palmeri reveals an expansive history of now forgotten multimodal approaches to composing moving images and sounds and demonstrates how current compositionists can productively remix these past pedagogies to address the challenges and possibilities of the contemporary digital era. A strikingly original take on the recent history of composition, Remixing Composition is an important work for the future of writing instruction in a digital age.