Inside Multimodal Composition

A variety of discourse modes and composition practice now pervade much of our mediated communication. Digital tools factor heavily in such composition, and increasingly its collaborative character. They also have a bearing on our changing and indeed, merging, practices as designers, educators, and researchers. This wide-ranging and ambitious collection of largely project-based contributions addresses these developments with reference to the core notion of multimodality. The chapters take the social semiotics of this approach and relate it to a wide range of disciplines and intersections in a sociocultural perspective on design, mediation and learning. Production-based inquiry is also central and offers means of moving inside experimental and more established compositional processes and products. Some of the areas addressed include: critical issues in digital design; attention to media and materiality; persuasion and performativity; negotiating relations and networks; shaping mediated meaning making; reviewing historical aspects, genres and norms; exploring border crossings, identity and articulation; and moving multimodality into digital communication analysis. Graduate students and researchers in rhetoric, writing, new literacies, applied discourse studies, media and communication, and visual communication will find a variety of studies that are related theoretically and methodologically.