A text can be anything that you might “read”—not just words but also images, data, audio, video, or combinations of media. A print book, for example, may include words alone or words and visuals. Texts that appear online can grow much richer with the ability to include animations, video, audio, links, and interactive features. As a result, college writers today have choices that were almost unimaginable until quite recently.

The rhetorical context for your design

Ultimately, the organization and look of any text you design should depend on what you are trying to achieve. You should make decisions about layout, formatting, color, fonts (for written words), nonalphabetic elements such as images or video, and other aspects of design based on rhetorical needs—your audience, purpose, topic, stance, genre conventions, and so on—and on practical constraints, such as the time and tools available.

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Design choices for different genres

Although you will probably still be assigned to compose traditional texts such as academic essays, you may also be asked to create coursework in other genres. Research indicates that today’s students are encountering assignments that range from newsletters and poster presentations to PechaKuchas and video essays and that multimodal assignments are increasingly characteristic of first-year writing courses. Whatever genre you choose for your assignment, familiarize yourself with conventions of design for that genre, and think carefully about the most appropriate and compelling design choices for your particular context.

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Print or digital delivery

One of your first design decisions will be choosing between print delivery and digital delivery (or deciding to create both print and digital versions). In general, print documents are easily portable, easy to read without technical assistance, and relatively fast to produce. In addition, the tools for producing print texts are highly developed and stable. Digital texts, on the other hand, can include sound, animation, and video; updates are easy to make; distribution is fast and efficient; and feedback can be swift. Design decisions may have similar goals, such as clarity and readability, no matter what medium you are working in, but the specific choices you make to achieve those goals may differ in print and digital texts.

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