Rules for writers, Tenth edition - Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers 2021

Read actively
Reading and writing about multimodal texts
Academic Reading and Writing

✵ Guidelines for analyzing a multimodal text

Multimodal texts combine two or more of the following modes: words, static images, moving images, and sound. In many of your college classes, you’ll have the opportunity to read and write about multimodal texts, such as advertisements, podcasts, videos, or websites. Like a print text, a multimodal text can be read carefully to understand what it says and how it communicates its purpose and reaches its audience. Use the guidelines for active reading on page 60 to help you preview, annotate, and converse with a multimodal text.

5a Read actively.

When you read a multimodal text, you are not only reading words; you might also be examining a text’s design and composition, and perhaps even its pace and volume. Your work as a reader involves understanding the modes — words, images, and sound — separately and then analyzing how the modes work together.

One student, Ren Yoshida, annotated an advertisement for fairly traded coffee. In his annotations, which appear alongside the ad on the next page, you’ll see how Yoshida jotted down his observations of the ad’s design features and questioned some of the ad’s language. He used his annotations to help him converse with the text, questioning what seemed puzzling and contradictory, as he worked to understand the advertisement’s message and his response to it. Yoshida’s annotations provided a basis for the analysis that appears in 5d.