Margins
On Multimodality book cover
On Multimodality
New Media in Composition Studies
2014
First Published
4.04
Average Rating
268
Number of Pages

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.

Avg Rating
4.04
Number of Ratings
28
5 STARS
29%
4 STARS
46%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Jonathan Alexander
Author · 6 books
Jonathan Alexander is a writer and podcaster living in Southern California. The author, co-author, or editor of twenty-one books, he has been called one of “our finest essayists” (Tom Lutz, award-winning writer and founding editor of LARB). Jonathan is also Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved