Commentary

Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects is essential for instructors who wish to incorporate multimodal projects into their curriculum. Even as a scholar “familiar” with digital media and multimodality, this text provided me with questions, guidelines, and definitions I did not know before. From its very beginning, I agree with the text’s assertion that “whether authors are working with words, images, sound, or movement, decisions about what content says and how it looks and functions are necessarily entwined” (v). While not its sole focus, this text provides justification for multimodal scholarship and its value in the classroom, which helps pitch it to an audience of instructors/students who may be unsure how to incorporate multimodality. Rather than take a theoretical approach, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects is very practical—especially as it offers guidelines, questions to consider, definitions of genre analysis and rhetorical situation, and an easy-to-understand overview of how Copyright and fair use will impact multimodal classroom work. Chapter 8 confronts the exigency of multimodality, since the “multimodal afterlife” is of increasing concern as education’s digital landscape changes so rapidly. In addition, the tips for documenting and reporting on the multimodal design process encourage readers to think about multimodal projects in the long term. In this way, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects speaks to the entirety of the multimodal design process.

Perhaps the best feature of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects is its accessibility. Information is not overwhelming, and is presented in a way that engages readers. Unlike some published guides to composing, Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects gives students autonomy, and allows that students are already aware of the process/design of written texts. The book features relatable examples such as memes, Twitter profiles, Facebook status updates, and YouTube videos. The examples work so well with the content that the text of this book is concise, yet thorough enough to answer the most important questions surrounding multimodal composition. The cherry on top? “Because writing can be more than words on a page” (back cover), the authors have provided integrated media resources online to supplement lessons and examples from the text. This integrated system draws connections between the printed word and multimodality—exemplifying the very values that this text is built upon.