The New Media Writer

The New Media Writer is a visual rhetoric that will show students how to read the arguments made by common electrate texts that exist in the public sphere, how to analyze the design principles used to create those texts, and how to make use of those principles for their own rhetorical purposes. And if students are to write electrate texts, they will benefit by learning from an electrate text, rather than a traditional print textbook, with all its limitations. While the book has a traditional text component, it also incorporates video, audio, images, hyperlinks, and other features of new media to illustrate, instruct, and explain the rhetorical and design principles throughout. The New Media Writer demonstrates and models the same kinds of electrate texts it asks students to create. The New Media Writer takes the traditional rhetorical triangle and expands it into the rhetorical tetrahedron, illustrating not only logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos (or writer/reader/text) among its points and surfaces but also design, genre, and medium. To make learning these design principles more concrete, each principle is illustrated using examples from multiple genres, allowing students to learn each design principle while first examining and ultimately constructing an electrate text. In addition to traditional classroom and workplace genres, The New Media Writer includes assignments from extracurricular environments and service-learning assignments that provide specific, localized exigencies for writing.