Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance

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Words and images can harmonize to clarify meaning in a variety of texts. This interdisciplinary work presents practitioners, researchers, creative artists, and teachers discussing how we process and develop meaning from words and images. This study is especially important for writers and designers working in electronic communication environments, where the marriage of words and images challenges traditional training. Ranging from theory to practice, chapters examine both cognitive issues and aesthetic concerns. This book explores topics such as:^L^DBLHuman processing of images and text^DBLThe roles of written language in project development in the arts^DBLUses of images and visual thinking by writers^DBLHow the ways in which words and images convey meaning can be both different and complementary^LProfessionals, teachers, and students will be understand more effective uses of text and visual displays, and today's writer or designer will learn to clarify complex ideas by controlling the intersections of words and images.

Reviews

"An important step in our efforts to theorize, teach, and understand communication as both a verbal and visual activity. Nancy Allen assembles a richly varied, challenging, and useful cast of contributors, working from multiple perspectives to help map out, in both active and reflective ways, this crucial terrain. A useful resource for teachers and students in technical communication, computers and composition, or any field interested in both theoretical and applied views of communication."-Johndan Johnson-Eilola Clarkson University
"This book fills a huge gap in the literature on professional communication. We have many books on images and many books on writing, but few that deal with the historical, theoretical, and practical issues connected with the relationship of words and images. Professor Allen and the other contributors to this volume--all of them either established leaders or bright new prospects in the interdisciplinary study of integrated text design--handle the topic with grace, thoroughness, insight, and lucidity. The book offers an excellent starting point for teachers and practitioners of professional communication, especially those who struggle with the problem of how to harness the power of electronic text and image processing in creating finely integrated print documents as well as web pages and other hypertexts."-M. Jimmie Killingsworth Professor of English, Texas A&M University
"Writing teachers need to understand writing as more than merely words. The crucial starting point for developing a multimedia notion of writing is a better conceptual grasp of the relationship between words and images--and Nancy Allen's book provides just such a focus. The essays in this volume explore a wide range of ways that words and images 'collaborate'. Rather than simply rounding up the usual suspects in one field or another, Allen reaches out to scholars, writers, and designers in a variety of professions and academic fields. The result is an interdisciplinary set of voices from areas such as photography, creative writing, linguistics, theater, digital production, media studies, literary criticism, and rhetoric writing. Allen's collection does an excellent job of calling attention to this rich and important area of study."-James E. Porter Professor of Rhetoric and Writing, Michigan State University
Allen offers an overview of the history of interrelationships between words and images, including the challenge of developing meaning from words and images in photographs, film, and computers. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-Choice
"Allen offers an overview of the history of interrelationships between words and images, including the challenge of developing meaning from words and images in photographs, film, and computers. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above."-Choice

Author Bio

NANCY ALLEN is Associate Professor of Written Communication in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University. She teaches courses in professional communication, rhetoric, research methods, and computers and writing. She has published in such journals as Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, IEEE, Journal of Computer Documentation, and Journal of Business and Technical Communication and in books on technical communication. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Computers and Composition.