Customer Reviews

Writing for Multimedia and the Web, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Content Development for Interactive Media

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Timothy Garrand speaks with authority about the many challenges of designing and writing interactive media for the web and other multimedia programs. Writing for Multimedia and the Web serves as a practical guide for writers in the throes of this demanding work. Good writing skills are not enough, as Garrand both shows and tells. His book is packed with writing tips, case studies, and examples of the formats and genres a multimedia writer might tackle, including:
* Storyboards, flowcharts, and other design documents that can be effective to help clients, marketing, and production teams understand a project
* Instructional, video, game and story scripts
* Web sites and kiosks for corporations, marketing, e-learning and museums
* Blogs, podcasts, portals and more...
The best part of Garrand's book is that he follows his own advice, with clear titles and subtitles, lots of indexing, chunked information, and clear-cut paths for quickly finding topics. It's amazing how easily you can scan through the nearly 500 pages of text and the jam-packed CD to get to what you need to know. Additional resources are available for those brave enough to attempt teaching this topic.

As a broad overview of writing for web sites and interactive media products, this book covers all of the key topics (although briefly) for a student who wants to work in this field. The examples are extensive and well chosen, and often geared to the interests of young adults. But the book doesn't provide exercises or projects for learning specific skills. Readers will want to supplement this book with other resources that present detailed information on specific skills and techniques.

I bought this book thinking it would be a practical tool for writing dynamic, engaging web copy... but it wasn't. It was too theoretical and had a boring textbook feel to it. I wanted to learn how users interact with the web and web text, but this book only told me broad generalizations that anyone who uses the web frequently already knows. Even though it's updated ("third edition") much of felt way out of date.

I'm using this text for one of my Communication courses and it has great explanations and insight into mutlimedia and interactive media.

Book was in condition, as advertised. Great condition and was promptly shipped and delivered.