Chapter 16: Design for Print and Digital Writing

CHAPTER 16
Design for Print and Digital Writing

CONNECT: How can peer reviewers help you revise the visual structure of your project? 4b, 16b

CREATE: Draft the overall look of your first slide, your home page, or another key part of your multimodal project, and set up a peer-review session with friends or classmates to collect responses.

REFLECT: Respond to the Storyboard on getting help from peer reviewers.

IN THE ANCIENT GREEK WORLD, a speaker’s delivery (known as actio) was an art every educated person needed to master: how a speaker delivered a speech—tone, pace, volume, use of gestures, and so on—had a great impact on the message and how it would be received. In the age of (mountains of) information, as Professor Richard Lanham points out, it’s increasingly difficult to get and hold people’s attention. As a result, we are returning to the ancient art of delivery. But writers now have many tools that writers and speakers in the ancient world did not have to help them get and hold an audience’s attention, from font options to color and video. All these tools help bring the dimension of visual rhetoric to today’s writing.