- A new kind of reader highlights the way verbal and visual texts speak to each other. Essays, photographs, Web sites, poems, cartoons, stories, billboards, advertisements, paintings, monuments, maps, and album covers are grouped in clusters that cross genre and medium — a related poster, web site, essay, and poem, for example. This presentation helps students map out relationships between verbal and visual messages. This is the reader for those instructors who want their students to read and write critically about all the texts they encounter.
- Six familiar themes — with a twist. Staging Portraits outlines the way verbal and visual portraits reveal certain details and hide others. Telling Secrets asks why we love to tell secrets, and what our secrets tell about us. Shaping spaces explores what it means to think spatially — whether the space is a piece of paper, our room, or the World Wide Web. Making History traces how describing the past often means making it up. Dividing Lines shows how different groups of people draw lines between us and them. Redefining Media sketches out the evolving relationship between message, method, and medium.
- Convergences introduces a new methodology for reading a wide range of verbal and visual texts, helping students to ask what, where, when, how, and why as they read and write. Why does it matter that the message be tailored for the medium? Who is this advertisement aimed at, and what is it selling? Convergences presents each new reading as the end result of conscious choices made by its creator and helps students learn to make conscious choices constructing their own texts.