This article contributes to discussions of literacy in Old Kingdom Egypt (2700–2200 BCE) by offering a new perspective on “reading” that challenges alphabet-centric approaches and emphasizes the semiotic functionality of hieroglyphs. Through an analysis of publicly displayed royal decrees in temples, it argues that these texts, composed primarily of ideograms, nouns, and specific visual arrangements rather than phonograms or grammatical constructs, were designed to communicate effectively with nonscribal audiences. Local Egyptians, familiar with the visual layouts and ideograms, could grasp key messages, enabling the state to disseminate practical information about work-related regulations and discourage unauthorized labor. This pictorial and visual grammar-based system, which avoided the use of phonetic complements, facilitated comprehension across dialects, functioning as lexical “reminders” reinforced by oral transmission.

This study explores how the scholarly writing practices of early-career academics in China create new “ecologies” of research writing. Using a literacy studies framing, we examine how productivity policies, including evaluation and incentivization, impact the writing practices of academics working in the humanities and social sciences (HSS), creating a set of spatiotemporal predicaments and uncertainties. We draw on interviews and multimodal journals obtained from 22 academics at Chinese universities. Findings reveal important practices among China’s HSS academics within the distinctive institutional and policy landscape of Chinese academia, including how they organize their space and time for writing, the significance and function of writing practices, and the ways in which boundaries are disrupted and negotiated. We show that writing is deeply intertwined with multiple spaces and times, forming an ecology of research writing within emergent and shifting assemblages. We emphasize the need for further theoretical and practical understanding of research writing in the context of Chinese universities.

The study investigates how Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners construct translanguaging space via multimodal orchestration in collaborative English-language YouTube videos introducing Chinese culture. By triangulating multimodal analysis of videos and students’ interview responses, the current research maps translanguaging space construction within and across modes and identifies four multimodal translanguaging space patterns. Meanwhile, learners’ understanding of modal affordances, their intents, their perceptions of the intended audience, and their experiences with relevant (multimodal) texts were found to influence their multimodal orchestration in translanguaging space construction. Digital multimodal composing (DMC) provides EFL learners with opportunities to draw upon their expanded multimodal repertoires, to combine multiple modes for meaning-making creatively, and to transcend the boundaries of languages and modalities critically. Pedagogical suggestions are provided regarding integrating DMC tasks into multilingual learning environments.

This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

This article describes a qualitative study of how two ethnic Burmese families in the United States authored storybooks that included their children’s drawings and writings representing their families’ stories. The theoretical perspectives of storytelling and the social semiotics multimodal approach were utilized in this inquiry. The data included interviews, video recordings of the storybook-writing process, artifacts, and informal conversations. The data were collected when both families participated in the study together. The findings show that the children took the lead in authoring and composing their storybooks and carefully chose the topics for their drawings and writings and that the process was mediated through their mothers’ oral storytelling and conversations with siblings and friends. The findings suggest that schools and teachers need to incorporate multimodal storytelling into class activities and use storytelling to support children’s agency.

Drawing on discussions of (de)coloniality and translanguaging, this article reports findings from a classroom-based ethnographic study, focusing on how a self-identified Latina bilingual student resists colonial constructs of language and literacies in her multimodal project. Based on an analysis of the student’s multimodal composition, other classroom writings, and a semistructured interview, I examine how she creatively and critically draws on her entire language and literacy repertoire in her multimodal composing. More specifically, I demonstrate how she draws from and builds on her lived experiences of linguistic injustices and racialization and transforms such experiences into embodied knowledge making and sharing through her multimodal composing. I argue that students’ engagement with multimodality can and should be cultivated, sustained, and amplified as a site of translingual activism and justice with decolonial potential, and I suggest, further, that such a shift requires a change in approaching, reading, and valuing students’ multimodal meaning making.

The present article examines collaborative writing in organizational consulting and training, where writing takes place as part of a group discussion assignment and is carried out by using digital writing technologies. In the training, the groups use digital tablets as their writing device in order to document their answers in the shared digital platform. Using multimodal conversation analysis as a method, the article illustrates the way writing is interactionally accomplished in this setting where digital writing intertwines with face-to-face interaction as the groups jointly formulate a documentable written entry for specific institutional purposes. The results show how writing is managed in situated ways and organized by three specific aspects: access, publicity, and broader organizational practice. The article advances prior understanding of the embodied nature of writing and writing with technologies by demonstrating how the body and the material and social nature of writing technologies intertwine within situated social interaction.

Language-oriented literacy standards offer mostly linguistic accounts of text complexity. In response, the present article demonstrates that multimodal and visual narratives offer additional ways to understand and discuss text complexity. This descriptive analysis of one fourth-grader’s comic provides an account of the multimodal patterns and orchestration noted across the pages of the comic. Data sources included the published comic, as well as a multimodal artifact elicitation interview conducted with Sabrina, a fourth-grade student. The authors show how Sabrina constructed a complex multimodal text by drawing not only from her knowledge of image and written language but also from her experiences with spoken language, touch, facial expressions, and gesture. These findings suggest that it would be beneficial for teachers and researchers to continue to create curricular space for multimodal composing opportunities and that stakeholders in language arts and communication education might deepen collaborations to develop instructional frameworks that support students as they compose using modes beyond language across the grade levels.

Immersive virtual reality (VR) technology is becoming widespread in education, yet research of VR technologies for students’ multimodal communication is an emerging area of research in writing and literacies scholarship. Likewise, the significance of new ways of embodied meaning making in VR environments is undertheorized—a gap that requires attention given the potential for broadened use of the sensorium in multimodal language and literacy learning. This classroom research investigated multimodal composition using the virtual paint program Google Tilt Brush™ with 47 elementary school students (ages 10–11 years) using a head-mounted display and motion sensors. Multimodal analysis of video, screen capture, and think-aloud data attended to sensory-motor affordances and constraints for embodiment. Modal constraints were the immateriality of the virtual text, virtual disembodiment, and somatosensory mismatch between the virtual and physical worlds. Potentials for new forms of embodied multimodal representation in VR involved extensive bodily, haptic, and locomotive movement. The findings are significant given that research of embodied cognition points to sensorimotor action as the basis for language and communication.

This article contributes to an emerging body of scholarship on multimodal composition in the poetry classroom through a study of Finnish lower secondary students’ digital videomaking in response to poetry. The study explores students’ use of semiotic resources in their interpretive work in transmediating a poem into a digital video, with a particular interest in their use of sound elements. Based on social semiotic theory of multimodality, the analysis shows how the students in a variety of ways used sound elements, together with other semiotic resources, to explore their interpretation of the poetic text. Sound elements in particular became a key resource in the interpretive work, giving the students the opportunity to elaborate on topical issues of interest and importance to them while reinforcing their social agency. The study demonstrates the relevance of sound elements in students’ digital composing and explorations of poetry. Furthermore, it reveals how the students showed a capacity as well as a willingness to act, to have influence, and to make substantiated claims for recognition regarding critical issues related to sexuality and society.

Writing and genre scholarship has become increasingly attuned to how various nontextual features of written genres contribute to the kinds of social actions that the genres perform and to the activities that they mediate. Even though scholars have proposed different ways to account for nontextual features of genres, such attempts often remain undertheorized. By bringing together Writing, Activity, and Genre Research, and Multimodal Interaction Analysis, the authors propose a conceptual framework for multimodal activity-based analysis of genres, or Multimodal Writing, Activity, and Genre (MWAG) analysis. Furthermore, by drawing on previous studies of the laboratory notebook (lab book) genre, the article discusses the rhetorical action the genre performs and its role in mediating knowledge construction activities in science. The authors provide an illustrative example of the MWAG analysis of an emergent scientist’s lab book and discuss its contributions to his increasing participation in medical physics. The study contributes to the development of a theoretically informed analytical framework for integrative multimodal and rhetorical genre analysis, while illustrating how the proposed framework can lead to the insights into the sociorhetorical roles multimodal genres play in mediating such activities as knowledge construction and disciplinary enculturation.

Scholarship on trajectories of becoming with literate activities is of growing interest in Writing Studies, particularly in accounts of writing grounded in cultural-historical and dialogic approaches, and in lifespan accounts of writing. The research reported here contributes to those conversations by tracing trajectories of becoming that are dynamically nonlinear, necessarily messy, and predicated on exceptionally complex streams of times, places, life experiences, artifacts, and literate activities. I draw from one case study with Alex, once a deeply faithful Christian who, over complex trajectories of semiotic becoming, lost her faith and was left to make sense of drastic perspectival shifts, in large part, through literate activity. Weaving analyses of talk across 2 years, 15 interviews, and multiple texts and textual interactions, I trace a narrative of Alex’s trajectories of unbecoming/becoming. I argue that Writing Studies needs flexible, theoretically grounded methods to trace becoming across lifespan trajectories and I address this imperative by showcasing one approach— dialogic animation protocols coupled with dialogic analyses.

The present study used a longitudinal mixed-method design to investigate the relationship between post-PhD researchers’ writing conceptions and their experiences, scholarly trajectory, and networking capabilities. A total of 134 Spanish post-PhD researchers answered the Post-PhD Experience—Survey scales on Academic Writing and Social Support. One year later, a subsample of 21 participated in retrospective multimodal interviews, in which visual methods (Journey and Network Plots) were applied to analyse their writing trajectories during this period of time. The person-centred analysis revealed three post-PhD profiles regarding writing conceptions and evidenced differences among them in the way they participate in the research community and interact with other researchers. Qualitative results suggest the post-PhD researchers in each profile position themselves in the community differently and subsequently engage in distinctive writing experiences. The study provides evidence of how writer profiles appear to mediate trajectories and networking, something not evident when using only sectional designs. Relational agency is revealed to be an important aspect of productive writers. Pedagogical implications are discussed, particularly the need to promote writers’ awareness on how their writing conceptions intertwine with their strategic management of research writing practices in different contexts.

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892–1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the mechanics of the devices by constructing a series of textual-visual relationships, requiring that the reader scan back and forth between the written text and the accompanying visual. These multimodal texts demonstrate how the students used writing activities to create a narrative of equipment development, which highlighted the centrality of trained vision in enculturating graduate students into disciplinary writing practices in the late 19th century. Through an analysis of the specific interactions and the network of visuals the students used to reconstruct a history of Ether investigation, scholars of writing and rhetoric can see how important inclusion of equipment and its detailed discussion was to graduate writing and disciplinary enculturation in the sciences.

People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.

In this study, we examine how youth use media production to represent, (de)legitimate, and reimagine their experiences of hypercriminalization—the pervasive complex of social practices such as racial profiling that position young men of color as “always-already criminal.” We analyze two clips from a youth-produced news show called POPPYN, specifically a 2014 episode focusing on youth and the criminal justice system, using tools from recontextualization analysis and multimodal semiotics, which together allow us to index the substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, and additions of component elements of social practices. Through investigation of linguistic and multimodal processes that represent social actors, actions, and constructions of their legitimacy, this study demonstrates ways that media making can serve as a tool for youth of color to process and rewrite persistent hypercriminalizing positionings in more agentive and hopeful ways. We end by proposing implications for multimodal literacy practices and pedagogies.

Resulting from stroke or brain injury, aphasia affects individuals’ ability to produce and comprehend language, but it also creates profound social changes, limiting individuals’ opportunities to communicate or to be seen as capable of communication. To address these challenges, the field of communicative sciences and disorders (CSD) has sought to ensure “communicative access” by reducing barriers to communication. This article, through an analysis of the communicative practices of participants in a memoir group for people with aphasia, develops a nuanced conception of communicative access as a process of negotiation across individuals and modes and not just as a process of reducing barriers. The study shows, specifically, that rather than the mere presence of multiple semiotic resources enabling communicative access, individuals enact access by flexibly shifting between modes to take advantage of various kinds of affordances that best suit their needs. This willingness to use modes in atypical or nonnormative ways importantly challenges the very idea of “normal” communication. The theory of communicative access developed in this article melds (a) a CSD understanding of communication as social and tied inextricably to identity with (b) a disability studies conception of access as an ongoing, negotiated process and with (c) a writing studies emphasis on literate, communicative activity as complexly layered, distributed, negotiated, and (multi)semiotic.

Drawing on a text-based ethnography of digital writing in a biology laboratory, this article examines the text trajectory of a scientific manuscript and a scientific team’s related writing for public audiences, including for citizen scientists. Using data drawn from texts, observations, interviews, and related artifacts, the author examines how scientists conceptualize and adapt their multimodal writing for specialized scientific audiences as well as lay audiences interested in the work of scientific inquiry. Three concepts— meaning compression, meaning expansion, and meaning attention—were used to analyze the multimodal strategies that scientists employ when composing for different audiences. Findings suggest that while scientists often restrict their writing practices to meaning compression to maintain the values and conventions of scientific genres, they also sometimes deploy a wider range of multimodal strategies when writing for nonspecialist audiences. These findings underscore the complex rhetorical environments scientists navigate and the need to support emerging scientific writers’ development as versatile writers able to adapt varied multimodal strategies to diverse rhetorical and epistemic goals.

This study examined adolescents’ perspectives on their multimodal composing goals and designs when creating digital projects in the context of an English Language Arts class. Sociocultural and social semiotics theoretical frameworks were integrated to understand six 12th grade students’ viewpoints when composing three multimodal products—a website, hypertext literary analysis, and podcast—in response to a well-known literary text. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, written reflections, and multimodal products. Findings revealed how adolescents concurrently composed for multiple purposes and audiences during the literature analysis unit. In particular, students viewed projects as a platform to emotionally affect and entertain a broader audience, as well as a conduit through which they could represent themselves as composers. Emphasis was placed on creating cohesive compositions—ranging from close modal matching to building meaning at a thematic level and creating a multisensory experience indicative of the novel’s narrative world. These findings contribute a multidimensional understanding of adolescents’ various and interacting multimodal composing goals and have implications for leveraging modal affordances in the classroom.

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

This article examines multimodal texts created by a cohort of academically marginalized secondary school students in Singapore as part of a language arts unit on persuasive composition. Using an interpretivist qualitative approach, we examine students’ multimodal designs to highlight opportunities taken up for expanding literacy practices traditionally not available to lower tracked students. Findings examine the authorial stances and rhetorical force that students enacted in their multimodal designs, despite lack of regular opportunities to author complex texts and a schooling history of low expectations. We extend arguments for the importance of providing all students with opportunities to take positions as designers and creators while acknowledging systematic barriers to such opportunities for academically marginalized students. This study thus counters deficit views of academically marginalized students’ literacy practices by demonstrating their authoritative stance taking and enacting of layered positionalities through multimodal designs in which they renegotiated ways of knowing and doing in their classroom.

This study describes how members of a transnational social network of Mexican bilinguals living in Chicago manipulate their language on online social media to facilitate and maintain close connections across borders. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, I examine conversations posted on members’ Facebook walls and the contexts in which the discourses are formed. I argue that members of this transnational social network engage in the use of deterritorialized discourse to create chronotopes; that is, through discourse, members connect temporal and spatial relationships and form them into a single constructed context. These chronotopes help members recontextualize Facebook as a unique transnational social place that connects families and allows for the continuation of cultural practices that maintain their transnationalism. This study sheds light on the use of linguistic resources and modes of communication to examine how individuals construct imagined experiences within a real intimate community in the deterritorialized space of online social media.

The work of Carol Berkenkotter and others who have expanded the realm of personal narrative studies over the past several decades would not have been possible without the pioneering efforts of those who first brought the study of narrative to nonliterary discourses. By revisiting what personal narratives were to these pioneers—working outward from William Labov in particular—this article considers how the early expansion of the field helps us to understand the far wider expansion of multimodal personal narrative today. In doing so, I suggest that understanding the notion of a personal narrative requires a twofold commitment to inquiry: first, about what makes it narrative; and second, about what makes it personal. These commitments hinge on two crucial junctures, what I call the problem of scope and the problem of autonomy. Framed as questions, the former asks, When does a narrative begin and end? The latter asks, Whose narrative is it? This recuperative essay shows that the heuristics of scope and autonomy can be useful ways to think about the ongoing complexities of personal narrative and its analysis.

Handwritten texts carry significant information, extending beyond the meaning of their words. Modern neurology, for example, benefits from the interpretation of the graphic features of writing and drawing for the diagnosis and monitoring of diseases and disorders. This article examines how handwriting analysis can be used, and has been used historically, as a methodological tool for the assessment of medical conditions and how this enhances our understanding of historical contexts of writing. We analyze handwritten material, writing tests and letters, from patients in an early 20th-century psychiatric hospital in southern Germany (Irsee/Kaufbeuren). In this institution, early psychiatrists assessed handwriting features, providing us novel insights into the earliest practices of psychiatric handwriting analysis, which can be connected to Berkenkotter’s research on medical admission records. We finally consider the degree to which historical handwriting bears semiotic potential to explain the psychological state and personality of a writer, and how future research in written communication should approach these sources.

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and adaptive to the complexities of intertextual and multimodal rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that rhetorical scholars can productively integrate systemic-functional linguistics, multimodal text analysis, and micro-intertextual comparison. I illustrate how this micro-rhetorical toolkit can be employed to investigate the recontextualization of written political discourse in video journalism.

Against the backdrop of proliferating research on multimodality in the fields of literacy and writing studies, this article considers the contributions of two prominent theoretical perspectives—Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Situated Literacies—and the methodological tensions they raise for the study of multimodality. To delineate these two perspectives’ methodological tensions, I present an analysis of selected recent literature from both approaches and then analyze these tensions further as they emerge in two empirical studies published in this journal illustrating each approach. Despite the fact that SFL and Situated Literacies share some underlying theoretical assumptions and are sometimes drawn upon in concert by scholars, I illustrate how they differ in their treatment of multimodal texts and practices—as well as their methodologies—research design, data collected, analytic methods, and possible implications. This article thus seeks to outline the respective contributions of SFL and Situated Literacies to ongoing research on multimodality in literacy and writing studies and to encourage a conversation across theoretical and methodological borders.

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher’s social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold. The discourse surrounding multimodal composition was analyzed via inductive analysis. Students’ use of semiotic resources in the HyperStudio composition was analyzed with Unsworth’s image-language intermodal framework. Then, teacher-student conversations related to visual and linguistic signs were triangulated with students’ compositions. Findings show that a classroom teacher’s limited content knowledge as related to metafunctions and metalanguage of visual and linguistic sign systems affected the information taught to the students and, ultimately, their use of visual and linguistic signs. Students demonstrated tacit knowledge of image-language relations beyond what was taught but lacked the explicit knowledge to more strategically use visual and linguistic signs. Implications include the importance of creating opportunities for teachers to develop more substantive content knowledge of the metalanguages and metafunctions of various sign systems.

This article traces the trajectory of one particular scene in the work of three media students writing and filmmaking. The analysis scrutinizes the role of semiotic tools, such as synopsis and storyboard, in students’ filmmaking practice. Moreover, the use of interactional data combined with textual data allows for a rich recording of the activity, aiming to integrate a multimodal analysis into a sociocultural perspective on learners’ composing practices. The findings indicate that the students are not able to transfer their particular meaning from the written mode into the language of moving images because they downplay the role of the semiotic tools available to them in the educational context.

In this article, the authors engage the theoretical lens of multimodality in rethinking the practices and processes of composing in classrooms. Specifically, they focus on how learning new composing practices led some fifth-grade students to author new literate identities—what they call authorial stances—in their classroom community. Their analysis adds to the current research on the production and analysis of multimodal texts through an analysis of the interrelationships between multimodal composing processes and the development of literate identities. They found that by extending the composing process beyond print modalities students’ composing shifted in significant ways to reflect the circulating nature of literacies and texts and increased the modes of participation and engagement within the classroom curriculum.These findings are based on an ethnographic study of a multimodal storytelling project in a fifth-grade urban classroom.

Genred documents facilitate collaboration and workplace practices in many ways—particularly in the medical workplace. This article represents a portion of a larger grounded investigation of how medical professionals invoke a wide range of rhetorical strategies when deliberating about complex patient cases during weekly, multidisciplinary deliberations called Tumor Board meetings. Specifically, the author explores the role of one key document in oncological practice, the Standard of Care document. Each Standard of Care document (one for every known cancer) presents a set of national guidelines intended to standardize the treatment of cancer. Tumor Board participants invoke these guidelines as evidence for or against particular future action. In order to better understand how genred, generalizable guidelines like Standard of Care documents afford decision making amid uncertainty, the author conducts a temporal and contextual analysis of the document's use during deliberations as well as a modified Toulminian analysis of a representative sample. Results suggest that, while on its own the document achieves an authoritative, charter-like purpose, it fails to make explicit a link between individual patients' experiences and the profession's expectations for how to act. Implications for how genred, generalizable guidelines—given the way they encourage certain ways of seeing over others—organize and authorize work are discussed, and a modified Toulminian approach to understanding the relationship between claim and evidence in multimodal texts is modeled.

One privilege enjoyed by new-media authors is the opportunity to realize representations of Self that are rich textual worlds in themselves and also to engage the wider world, with a voice, a smile, imagery, and sound. Still, closer investigation of multimedia composition practices reveals levels of complexity with which the verbal virtuoso is unconcerned. This article argues that while technology-afforded multimedia tools make it comparatively easy to author a vivid text, it is a multiplicatively more complicated matter to vividly realize and publicize an authorial intention. Based on analysis of the digital story creation process of a youth named “Steven,” the authors attempt to demonstrate the operation of two forces upon which the successful multimodal realization of the author's intention may hinge: “fixity” and “fluidity.” The authors show how, within the process of digital self-representation, these forces can intersect to influence multimodal meaning making, and an author's life, in consequential ways.

This is a qualitative case study of two students' composing processes as they developed a documentary video about the Dominican Republic in an urban, public middle school classroom. While using a digital video editing program, the students moved across multiple media (the Web, digital video, books, and writing), drawing semiotic resources from each as they did so. Using sociosemiotic and dialogic-intertextual theoretical frameworks, the author examines how the interface of the video editing program influenced the students' composing by making new types of semiotic resources available and new means of combining these resources. As they moved across these media in a nonlinear fashion, the students created an interactive context for composing that transcended the individual possibilities of each respective medium. This suggests that multimedial composing environments offer a rich intertextual landscape and unique ways of making meanings.

Frequently writing is now no longer the central mode of representation in learning materials—textbooks, Web-based resources, teacher-produced materials. Still (as well as moving) images are increasingly prominent as carriers of meaning. Uses and forms of writing have undergone profound changes over the last decades, which calls for a social, pedagogical, and semiotic explanation. Two trends mark that history. The digital media, rather than the (text) book, are more and more the site of appearance and distribution of learning resources, and writing is being displaced by image as the central mode for representation. This poses sharp questions about present and future roles and forms of writing. For text, design and principles of composition move into the foreground. Here we sketch a social semiotic account that aims to elucidate such principles and permits consideration of their epistemological as well as social/pedagogic significance. Linking representation with social factors, we put forward terms to explore two issues: the principles underlying the design of multimodal ensembles and the potential epistemological and pedagogic effects of multimodal designs. Our investigation is set within a research project with a corpus of learning resources for secondary school in Science, Mathematics, and English from the 1930s, the 1980s, and from the first decade of the 21st century, as well as digitally represented and online learning resources from the year 2000 onward.

Young children are growing up in a time when literacy practices and textual productions are in flux. Yet literacy curricula, particularly for those deemed “at risk,” are tightly focused on the written language “basics.” What are the potential consequences? In this article, the author considers this question, drawing on an ethnographic study of child writing in an urban school site. Using a sociocultural and dialogic frame, she examines first graders' interpretations and negotiations of official writing practices, detailing how these (a) shaped their written language use, including use of time and space, multimodal tools, and expected voices and modeled ideologies and (b) pushed to the sidelines or left in the unofficial child world aspects of their knowledge and know-how, including a breadth of communicative practices and a diversity of graphological symbols. The author concludes with reflections on instructional links among official writing practices, children's literacy experiences, and the “basics” in contemporary times.

This article reports research that attempts to characterize what is powerful about digital multimodal texts. Building from recent theoretical work on understanding the workings and implications of multimodal communication, the authors call for a continuing empirical investigation into the roles that digital multimodal texts play in real-world contexts, and they offer one example of how such investigations might be approached. Drawing on data from the practice of multimedia digital storytelling, specifically a piece titled “Lyfe-N-Rhyme,” created by Oakland, California, artist Randy Young (accessible at http://www.oaklanddusty.org/videos.php), the authors detail the method and results of a fine-grained multimodal analysis, revealing semiotic relationships between and among different, copresent modes. It is in these relationships, the authors argue, that the expressive power of multimodality resides.

This article traces the historical and conceptual development of what is known as activity theory, from Vygotsky and Luria, to A. N. Leont’ev, to Engeström, in order to illustrate what I see as two problems with the activity theoretic approach, especially as manifest in the work of Leont’ev and Engeström: what I call the boundary and/or focus problem and the unit-of-analysis problem. In the second half of the article, I explore the social semiotic of an everyday artifact, the “speed bump,” and introduce a discovery heuristic for examining how this artifact functions mediationally in human activity. In so doing, I have tried to discover activity through principled analysis, rather than assuming activity or activity system a priori.

Using the notion of design developed as part of the New London Group's Multiliteracies Project, this qualitative multicase study examines undergraduate academic literacy as a multimodal achievement game. Retrospective interviews and textual analyses revealed a series of operations on course content that constituted moves in the game. The goal of the game was to find, move, and display content, including not only facts but also concepts and forms of situated knowledge that would gain the highest points on assessments. Better “players” were more aware than their lower achieving counterparts of the game as specific activity different from learning. They also had more nuanced and planned versions of the operations that began with what was expected on assessments and moved backwards toward sources. Findings support forms of preparing students for academic success through the multiliteracies pedagogy that combines consciousness raising through overt instruction with forms of immersion and critical analysis.

This article modifies Donna Haraway's concept of (counter) myth building as a way to facilitate social action. Counter myth building, as both a resource and a process, recognizes limitations on individual agency but foregrounds the productive capacity to be more than a social and historical construct. Because myths are multiple and enactments are unpredictable, both building and enacting counter myths are at best complicated. GirlZone and RadioGirl provide two sites for investigating these complications. As grassroots projects, GirlZone and RadioGirl are explicitly devoted to building counter myths as part of an activist agenda for social change. These sites illustrate how the complex semiotic and material processes of myth building may provide potential resources for these and other activists.

The different emphases that theorists and teachers place on the product and process of writing in their accounts of how writers construct meaning have been influenced by different traditions of Western thought that have historically been at odds: Whereas the designative tradition focuses on the ways in which artifacts of speech mediate people's thinking, the expressive tradition focuses on the transformation of inner speech to public speech, thus emphasizing the ways in which the activities of speaking and writing promote changes in consciousness. In this article, through the analysis of the writing of a high school senior, it is argued that these two positions are not mutually exclusive, but rather are complementary aspects of a semiotic view on writing. The primary data set is a “situated protocol”—that is, a think-aloud protocol, including both concurrent and retrospective accounts of writing process, conducted over a 4-month period. Through the protocol analysis and analysis of related data, I examine the ways in which this student's writing experiences reveal the interrelated roles of both designative and expressive functions of writing. The analysis also reveals that the writer found the situated protocol itself to be an enduring means of development and reflection and a tool for meditation.

The article offers a fresh perspective on semiotic approaches to writing. It endorses recent arguments for more study of writing that shapes and directs the production of material artifacts and for considering writing as one semiotic mode among others. The main purpose, however, is to consider a case of nonwritten symbolic production, architectural design, for what it may suggest for the study and the teaching of writing. A constructivist account is proposed whereby the design (like equivalent written texts) not only proposes and foreshadows a new object in the world but creates one, bringing into existence, through acts of representation, a virtual object that is real in its social effects. Transcripts from design conversations are drawn on to elucidate the characteristics of such virtual artifacts, and implications for writing are drawn.

The evolution of page design to improve the readability of technical writing can be traced to improvements in typography and also to the influence of Peter Ramus. Ramus's logic used bracketed outlines to show the relationships among ideas within larger concepts. Used by legal writers and Puritan theologians to analyze concepts, Ramist method was also used by English physicians who sought to create medical texts that could be easily read and remembered by students and practitioners. Texts that used Ramist method illustrate their writers' awareness of the importance of making information visually accessible by use of white space, headings that reveal hierarchies of ideas, and bracketed dichotomies and partitions to reveal content for selective reading.

This study examined the effects of computer network technologies on teacher-student and student-student interactions in a writing course emphasizing multiple drafts and collaboration. Two sections used traditional modes of communication (face-to-face, paper, and phone); two other sections, in addition to using traditional modes, used electronic modes (electronic mail, bulletin boards, and so on). Patterns of social interaction were measured at two times: 6 weeks into the semester and at the end of the semester. Results indicate that teachers in the networked sections interacted more with their students than did teachers in the regular sections. In addition, it was found that teachers communicated more electronically with less able students than with more able students and that less able students communicated more electronically with other students.