As Clive Thompson noted in Wired magazine in 2009, “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.” Times have indeed changed. More and more Americans are reading and writing for social purposes and for their jobs and communities, not just for school. Your “life writing” is increasingly likely to include blogs, online videos, PowerPoint presentations, and other texts incorporating not just words but images, sound, and video. And college writing classes are increasingly likely to require you to shift gears in similar ways—from writing posts on class forums and creating Web texts to making oral presentations with multimedia support. As one student explains, the multimodal realities of today’s academic work require you to become “ambidextrous in the digital age.”