Traditionally, a literate person was someone who could read and write. This definition remains current, but technologies have vastly increased the complexity of reading and writing. Multimodal online texts now combine written materials with images, sounds, and motions. Such texts can’t 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 by following links rather than paging through the defined sequence of a bound book.

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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. 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, as the essential challenge of deep, thoughtful reading applies to graphic novels, blogs, photo essays, and YouTube videos just as it does to printed books, articles, and essays. In fact, some 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 often media-rich contexts:

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