Multimodality in Writing: The State of the Art in Theory, Methodology and Pedagogy

What is it about?

This book is a collection of 13 seminal papers in multimodality by celebrated scholars such as Michael O’Toole, Daniel Perrin and Briana Ronan. It consists of an introduction (by Archer and Breuer) and two main parts: Section 1, ‘Writing within and across Modes’, and Section 2, ‘Writing Pedagogies: Agency and Design’.

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Why is it important?

The book brings together state-of-the art work on the design and production of multimodal texts which involve writing in different ways. It points out new aspects of multimodal research and theorizing writing practices from a multimodal perspective. It investigates ‘texts, producers of texts and readers of texts’ (p. 1), and also zeroes in on teaching multimodal text production and writing pedagogy. Much of the presented research in the book exhibits how ‘the regularities of modes and interests of sign makers’ (p. 1) are socially fashioned to recognize convention. To this end, ‘the approaches are totally underpinned by social and cultural theories of representation and communication’ (p. 1). Certain notions are key to perceiving and analyzing multimodality in writing; these notions include mode, resource, design, agency, transduction and transformation.

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