Traditionally, a literate person was someone who could read and write. That definition remains current, but online technologies have vastly increased the complexity of reading and writing. Multimodal texts now combine written materials with images, sounds, and motions. Such texts cannot be confined to the fixed form of a printed page and may be randomly or routinely updated. They also may be accessed flexibly as a reader wanders through sites and follows links rather than paging through the defined sequence of a bound book. More innovations, unimaginable now, might well emerge even before you graduate from college.

Learning to read and write effectively has likewise increased in complexity. Many people simply assume that a reader’s eye routinely moves from left to right, from one letter or word to the next. However, eye-movement studies show that readers actually jump back and forth, skip letters and words, and guess at words the eye skips. Online readers also may jump from line to line or chunk to chunk, scanning the page (see heat maps below). In addition, multimodal texts may draw the eye to, or from, the typical left-to-right, top-to-bottom path with an image. Analyzing the meaning or impact of an image may require “reading” its placement and arrangement.

What might these changes mean for you as a reader and writer? Your critical reading skills are likely to be increasingly useful. The essential challenge of deep, thoughtful reading applies to graphic novels, blogs, photo essays, and YouTube videos just as it applies to printed books, articles, and essays. In fact, some might argue that texts using multiple components and appealing to multiple senses require even more thorough scrutiny to grasp what they are saying and how they are saying it. Here are some suggestions about how you might apply your critical skills in these new contexts: