See What I Mean

If you're an executive, designer, product manager, marketer, or engineer, communication is part of your work. Using images and text in unique ways, comics can engage readers in ways traditional methods can't. In See What I Mean, you'll learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

Plains Indian Sign Talk (PST), a complex system of hand signs, once served as the lingua franca among many Native American tribes of the Great Plains, who spoke very different languages. Although some researchers thought it had disappeared following the establishment of reservations and the widespread adoption of English, Brenda Farnell discovered that PST is still an integral component of the storytelling tradition in contemporary Assiniboine (Nakota) culture. Farnell?s research challenges the dominant European American view of language as a matter of words only. In Nakota language practices, she asserts, words and gestures are equal partners in the creation of meaning. Drawing on Nakota narratives videotaped during field research at the Fort Belknap reservation in northern Montana, she uses the movement script Labanotation to create texts of the movement content of these performances. The first and only ethnographic study of contemporary uses of PST, Do You See What I Mean? draws on important developments in the study of language and culture to provide an action-centered analysis of spoken and gestural discourse. It offers a theoretical approach to language and the body that transcends the current ?intellectualist? versus ?phenomenological? impasse in social and linguistic theory.

Some educators may view diagrams, pictures, and charts as nice add-on tools for students who are visual thinkers. But Steve Moline sees visual literacy as fundamental to learning and to what it means to be human. In Moline' s view, we are all bilingual. Our second language, which we do not speak but which we read and write every day, is visual. From reading maps to decoding icons to using concept webs, visual literacy is critical to success in today' s world. The first edition of I See What You Mean, published in 1995, was one of the first books for teachers to outline practical strategies for improving students' visual literacy. In this new and substantially revised edition, Steve continues his pioneering role by including dozens of new examples of a wide range of visual texts--from time maps and exploded diagrams to digital tools like smartphone apps and tactile texts. In addition to the new chapters and nearly 200 illustrations, Steve has reorganized the book in a useful teaching sequence, moving from simple to complex texts. In one research strategy, called recomposing, Steve shows how to summarize paragraphs of information not as a heap of interesting facts but as a diagram. The diagram can then work as a framework for students to follow when writing an essay. This overcomes the teacher' s problem of cut and paste essays, and, by following their own diagram-summary, students have an answer to their familiar questions, Where do I start? What do I write next?

Practical and innovative, this book will assist students in developing their skills in effective, influential business communication. It is replete with research-based examples, tips and exercises and covers topics such as: customizing messages to different audiences; dealing with angry employers and customers; managing speech anxiety and stage fright; increasing credibility; and creating high-impact presentations.

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Laila Storch is a world-renowned oboist in her own right, but her book honors Marcel Tabuteau, one of the greatest figures in twentieth-century music. Tabuteau studied the oboe from an early age at the Paris Conservatoire and was brought to the United States in 1905, by Walter Damrosch, to play with the New York Symphony Orchestra. Although this posed a problem for the national musicians' union, he was ultimately allowed to stay, and the rest, as they say, is history. Eventually moving to Philadelphia, Tabuteau played in the Philadelphia Orchestra and taught at the Curtis Institute of Music, ultimately revamping the oboe world with his performance, pedagogical, and reed-making techniques. In 1941, Storch auditioned for Tabuteau at the Curtis Institute, but was rejected because of her gender. After much persistence and several cross-country bus trips, she was eventually accepted and began a life of study with Tabuteau. Blending archival research with personal anecdotes, and including access to rare recordings of Tabuteau and Waldemar Wolsing, Storch tells a remarkable story in an engaging style.

Whether along race, class or generational lines, hip-hop music has been a source of controversy since the beats got too big and the voices too loud for the block parties that spawned them. America has condemned and commended this music and the culture that inspires it. Dubbed ''the Hip-Hop Intellectual' by critics and fans for his pioneering explorations of rap music in the academy and beyond, Michael Eric Dyson is uniquely situated to probe the most compelling and controversial dimensions of hip-hop culture. Know What I Mean? addresses salient issues within hip hop: the creative expression of degraded youth that has garnered them global exposure; the vexed gender relations that have made rap music a lightning rod for pundits; the commercial explosion that has made an art form a victim of its success; the political elements that have been submerged in the most popular form of hip hop; and the intellectual engagement with some of hip hops most influential figures. In spite of changing trends, both in the music industry and among the intelligentsia, Dyson has always supported and interpreted this art that bloomed un watered, and in many cases, unwanted from our inner cities. For those who wondered what all the fuss is about in hip hop, Dysons bracing and brilliant book breaks it all down.

'What kind of person are you, Alex Tanner? How would you describe yourself?' 'Curious,' I said. 'I'd call myself curious. I like to find things out.' It's often proved my downfall . . . In her childhood Alex dreamt of being a private eye. Actually she'd wanted to be a male private eye in Los Angeles, working Philip Marlowe's patch; instead she's settled for being a freelance TV researcher and private investigator based in Notting Hill . . . And her latest investigation takes her to an exclusive boys' boarding school, Rissington Abbey. Her brief: to discover the state of mind of young Oliver de Sauvigny Desmoulins in the days before his drowning. But Alex soon begins to hear chilling reports about Rissington Abbey. Unfortunately she ignores them - until the second death . . .