The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media

Abstract

Every day we encounter texts that hold together words, drawings, colors, charts, photographs, animations, sound, video, and so on; sometimes these texts are a single page or screen, and sometimes we have to navigate through many pages or screens to gain sense of what the texts’ creators hope to achieve. This chapter offers a rhetorical approach (using both textual and contextual analysis, as Jack Selzer describes in his chapter on rhetorical analysis) for analyzing texts made up of multiple media, tied primarily to the visual presentations of pages and screens. The chapter raises questions about relations among the visual/material presentations of our texts and particular values of our time and place, such as efficiency, clarity, consumption, and standardization-and the “seriousness” of words and the non-seriousness of images-as a way of contextualizing the analysis and composing of texts that use different visual strategies.

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