About the Book A compact, writing-focused new edition of this popular guide to writing about visual and popular culture. From the Back Cover Wherever we look today, popular culture greets us with "texts" that make implicit arguments; this book helps students to think and write critically about these texts. The World Is a Text teaches critical reading, writing, and argument in the context of pop-culture and visual examples, showing students how to "read" everyday objects and visual texts with basic semiotics. The book shows how texts of all kinds, from a painting to a university building to a pair of sneakers, make complex arguments through their use of signs and symbols, and shows students how to make these arguments in their own essays. This new edition is rich with images, real-world examples, writing and discussion prompts, and examples of academic and student writing. The first part of the book is a rhetoric covering argumentation, research, the writing process, and adapting from high-school to college writing, while the second part explores writing about specific cultural topics. Notes, instruction, and advice about research are woven into the text, with research instruction closely tied to the topic being discussed. New to the updated compact edition are chapters on fashion, sports, and nature and the environment. Review Quotes "Students often feel stifled about writing and lack the passion to polish their skills in composition and rhetoric. The World Is a Text opens doors for writers and enables students to understand the power of reading and writing for life. I absolutely love the addition of chapters on nature, sports, fashion, and technology. These topics are terrific, and they broaden the scope of the book." -- Colleen Ruggieri, Ohio University "The World Is a Text is eminently accessible, familiar in its rhetorical vocabulary and engagement with the writing process, and comprehensive in projecting subject matter for college writing classes. From pop-culture topoi like fashion, music, and sports to complex social problems rooted in identity, gender, race, and technology, Silverman and Rader provide a wealth of invention heuristics in a dozen categories. Most interesting, perhaps, The World is a Text links writing self-consciously to reading--that crucial, complementary literate practice too often taken for granted in college writing textbooks." -- Peter Vandenberg, DePaul University Chicago About the Author Jonathan Silverman is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Dean Rader is Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.