A novel approach to cross-curricular reading and writing. NextText introduces students to cross-disciplinary reading, thinking, and writing by including topics that reflect the interdisciplinarity of academic study and research. Each chapter looks at a specific topic from the vantage point of two academic fields, exposing students to a broad range of disciplinary writing — from the fields of sociology, psychology, history, and religion — all within the framework of the topic at hand.
Carefully selected readings build on and speak to each other. Each chapter offers a diversity of sources taking distinctly different approaches to the theme, based on the very different audiences they are designed for. The texts can stand on their own, but together, the collection of texts in each chapter offer students a rich and nuanced sequence building towards a layered understanding of the topic at hand. They also represent a broad range of genres of writing from informal journalism to researched academic writing.
Coverage of multimedia and emerging genres. The Focus on Genre portfolios in each chapter look closely at emerging genres — such as blogs and graphic novels — and multimedia genres, such as Web sites and conceptual art. Each genre is introduced and annotated to provide students with a framework for engaging with the other examples in the portfolio. All genres represented are forms that will likely follow students outside of academia and into their daily lives. Questions at the end of each portfolio offer opportunities for critical reading and thought-provoking writing assignments — helping students develop a more sophisticated and analytical framework for these familiar forms.
Headnotes identify the context of each piece. The headnote for each selection identifies the original publication source and its audience, and includes a thumbnail image of the text’s original source, providing valuable insight into how an author’s point of view and intended audience significantly shape his or her work. The pre-reading CONTEXTS offer critical source information — for example, demographic information is given for all magazine texts encouraging students to think about how magazines define their audience. Post-reading questions take up this issue of context and allow students to consider and respond to the rhetorical choices that the writer made based on the piece’s original context.
A visual approach to "Reading Deeply,": modeling how to drill down below the surface of a text. Each chapter in NextText ends with an annotated Reading Deeply essay — most are research papers taken from academic journals — which models writerly reading, showing students how to "read deeply." The annotations map key references, allusions, sourcing conventions, and terminology in the featured essay, providing a visual snapshot on every page of how the selection works.