ABSTRACT
Long before the invention of computers, people around the world created, distributed, and read non-digital texts. In ancient Chinese cultures, people used a script called jiǎgǔwén, or oracle bone script. In ancient Roman cultures, people preferred codices, books made from stacking pages of papyrus, parchment, and other materials and then binding them with a cover. Even now, as computers dominate our daily lives, we still rely on a number of non-digital texts in a variety of ways, as the examples in this chapter demonstrate. True, digital technologies can sometimes make creating multimodal texts easier and more convenient, but non-digital technologies can sometimes be just as, if not more, appropriate to our writing situations. And, non-digital doesn’t mean non-technological. In fact, there are lots of technologies that help us create non-digital texts. Therefore, at the center of this chapter is a discussion of the similarities and the differences between non-digital and digital technologies and how we use them to write and distribute a variety of texts. This chapter also features discussion questions, activities, and assignments about what writing and technologies are made of and the choices writers make when using different materials to write both non-digital and digital texts.
