Afterword
To close out Bridging the Multimodal Gap: From Theory to Practice, Bruce Horner presented readers with "(In Lieu of an) Afterword: Rewriting the Difference of Multimodality: Composing Modality and Language as Practice," in which he challenged the field of composition and rhetoric to (re)conceptualize difference as not being indicative of a dichotomized perspective of old and new but rather as an ongoing, stable component of composition. Horner discouraged readers from viewing alphabetic texts as amodal or monomodal as he posited "all texts are always (already) multimodal" (p. 274). In helping students assume this reality through practice and experimentation, he claimed that we have worked to dispel some of the traditional hegemony and hierarchy perpetuated by disciplinary norms. Thus, Horner challenged writing instructors to resist dominant perspectives and ideologies of multimodality and language in an effort to afford students learning experiences characterized by autonomy and free of rhetorical constraints.