Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Open Professional and Technical Editing with Handbook
Tiffani Tijerina; Mara Crumby; Amber Anderson; Abigail Steele · University of Arkansas · 2026
Open Professional and Technical Editing is a collaboratively-authored and edited open textbook with both named and anonymous undergraduate and graduate-level student contributors from Dr. Tiffani Tijerina’s Advanced Editing and Editing for Usage and Style classes at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
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Converged Storytelling for Modern Audiences
Willie Tubbs · University of West Florida Pressbooks · 2026
Equal parts how-to guide and exploration of the mass media industry, this book examines all aspects of harnessing the immense power of modern storytelling tools to ethically serve an audience and society while earning a living along the way.
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Surviving Research Publication: A Guide for New Scholars
Lily Compton; Megan O'Donnell; Kristin Terrill · Iowa State University Digital Press · 2026
This handbook provides the hidden information needed to successfully navigate your first research publications. From the basics of a literature review, through ethics and the use of technology, this book is an essential guide for graduate students and early career researchers. Topics covered include: literature reviews, citations, literature searches, scholarly publishing, research impact measures, research ethics, copyright, authorship, plagiarism, document formatting, and digital accessibility.
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Media and Power
Bettina Fabos; Christopher Martin; Catherine Palczewski · Rod Library · 2026
This handbook guides students through concepts, content, and exercises that help them develop media literacy by understanding media and power. The authors want students to not only gain the ability to critically analyze the languages and discourses – textual, visual, audio, and code – that people use to create and interpret media content, but also to understand the overarching context: media possess immense power in contemporary societies around the world.
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Beyond the Podium: AI, Speech, and Civic Voice
Tiffany Petricini; Sherry Rice · Pennsylvania State University · 2026
This book begins not only with public speaking as a skill, but with communication as a human practice. From interpersonal conversations to civic speeches, from face-to-face dialogue to AI-mediated interaction, our ability to communicate with care and clarity has never been more important or more complex.
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Oral/Interpersonal Communication
Darrel Farmer; Bridget Bell · WisTech Open · 2025
Oral/Interpersonal Communication provides a comprehensive overview of foundational and advanced communication concepts, emphasizing practical skills for individual and group interactions. This textbook explores the communication process, including verbal and nonverbal strategies, the role of culture, and techniques for effective listening. It also covers essential topics such as public speaking, interpersonal relationships, teamwork, and conflict resolution. With a focus on real-world applications, the book delves into communication theories, ethics, and the impact of communication on relationships, organizational settings, and personal identity. Designed to prepare students for professional, social, and civic contexts, this resource encourages reflection and skill-building to foster meaningful and effective communication in diverse situations.
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Messages that Matter: Public Speaking in the Information Age
Josh Misner; Geoff Carr · North Idaho College · 2023
Messages that Matter: Public Speaking in the Information Age is a student-focused textbook that provides practical and real-world instruction in the art of public speaking, with a focus on how speakers can learn to communicate with diverse audiences to achieve their primary goal of being understood as intended. Using an audience-centered approach, Messages that Matter provides instruction on: audience analysis, overcoming speaker anxiety, research techniques for speakers, how to practice and refine delivery, persuasion techniques, and group presentation fundamentals.
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Communication in Practice
Jeremy Rose · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2025
This approachable and conversational textbook is intended for undergraduate communication courses. Dr. Jeremy Rose draws from an accomplished lecturing career to explore the fundamentals of communication with media examples and real world scenarios.
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Introduction to Communication and Media Studies
J.J. Sylvia IV · ROTEL · 2024
Introduction to Communication and Media Studies is an in-depth exploration of how communication shapes our world. This book traces the historical evolution of media, from the early days of the printing press to today’s digital age, examining key developments such as the telegraph, radio, television, and the internet. It also covers critical theories that explain media’s impact on society, including the effects of advertising, the role of public relations, and the emergence of social media as a powerful force in modern communication. Chapters on media literacy, critical thinking, and rhetorical analysis help students develop critical skills for understanding and analyzing media messages.
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Intro to Journalism Handbook: An Open Educational Resource for Journalism Students
Michael Downing · The Pennsylvania Alliance for Design of Open Textbooks (PA-ADOPT) · 2024
This book is intended as an open educational resource for beginning journalism students. It contains information on such topics as the First Amendment, 5 Ws (and H), the inverted pyramid, headlines and subheads, AP and in-house style, writing and editing exercises, and guidance on strategies for covering various stories and/or events. This book essentially replicates the structure of the author’s journalism classes, which are writing-intensive classes. As such, it focuses upon helping student writers begin working on reasonably serious, campus-level journalism assignments as quickly and effectively as possible. The goal is to submit stories, photos, and occasionally video to a university newspaper for publication, all the while following professional standards related to accuracy, clarity, grammar, and AP style.
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Preparing to Publish
Sarah Huffman; Elena Cotos; Kimberly Becker · Iowa State University · 2026
This book offers a wealth of instructional material on the topic of research article writing for publication and thesis or dissertation completion. The text provides graduate student writers with helpful information, strategies, and tips on navigating disciplinary writing in their fields and how to understand, dissect, and ultimately, construct their own research article. The text is organized according to a standard research article format, breaking down each section of the empirical research in a simple and straightforward manner to help graduate students build a quality, argument-driven manuscript as they write up their empirical study findings.
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Effective Professional Communication: A Rhetorical Approach
Rebekah Bennetch; Corey Owen; Zachary Keesey · University of Saskatchewan · 2021
Welcome to Effective Professional Communication, your text book for the RCM 200 course at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. As you already know, this course focuses on communicating in professional environments. Even if you haven’t held a job before, you know–at least on a basic level–that how you communicate changes depending on the context of your situation; specifically, you talk differently when you speak to customers/clients versus your co-workers versus your supervisors. Our goal in this text is to break down the communication process in professional environments so you can maximize your chance to get hired and retain your job once you graduate from university. We will do this by looking at communication through political, rhetorical, ethical, and interpersonal lenses and applying this knowledge to your future career.
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Technology, Media Literacy, and the Human Subject: A Posthuman Approach
Richard Lewis · Open Book Publishers · 2021
What does it mean to be media literate in today’s world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technological medium—how it enables and constrains both messages and media users. Additionally, there is often little attention paid to the broader context of interrelations which affect our engagement with media technologies. This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology. The author argues persuasively that the increased awareness provided by this posthuman approach affords us a greater chance for reclaiming some of our agency and provides a sound foundation upon which we can then judge our media relations. This book will be an indispensable tool for educators in media literacy and media studies, as well as academics in philosophy of technology, media and communication studies, and the post-humanities.
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Introduction to Narrative Journalism
Benjamin Wielechowski · UM-Dearborn Open Education · 2021
This textbook was created for beginning narrative journalists exploring the craft. It is inspired by the Narrative Journalism course (JASS/COMP/ENGL 310) at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and it is intended to be used as a guide and handbook. It is structured around the five elements of fiction, and provides both instruction and student examples of various narrative journalism projects.
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Advanced Public Speaking
Lynn Meade · University of Arkansas · 2021
This advanced public speaking textbook is designed to encourage you as a speaker and to help you sharpen your skills. It is written to feel like you are sitting with a trusted mentor over coffee as you receive practical advice on speaking. Grow in confidence, unleash your personal power and find your unique style as you learn to take your speaking to the next level--polished and professional.
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Small Group Communication: Forming & Sustaining Teams
Jasmine Linabary; Moon Castro · Jasmine R. Linabary · 2021
Small Group Communication: Forming & Sustaining Teams is an interdisciplinary textbook focused on communication in groups and teams. This textbook aims to provide students with theories, concepts, and skills they can put into practice to form and sustain successful groups across a variety of contexts.
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New Media Futures
Daniel Faltesek; Daniel Adams · Oregon State University · 2019
This book is intended for use in a large introductory class in new media in a program that covers the “full-stack” including critical/cultural studies, media management, diffusion of innovation, and synthetic media production. The first half of this basic sequence covered new media and democracy, finance, intellectual property law, basic games, and transmedia. The second half of the sequence covers many topics related to aesthetics, design, technology, and methodology. To that end, this book needed to be written so that it would be helpful for many different professors and trajectories of study. This book is in neither engineering, social science, nor the humanities, but also all of those. At the same time, this is a program in the Communication Studies and Media Studies traditions of the United States and that texture will come across.
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Communication, Affect, & Learning in the Classroom
Jason Wrench; Virginia Richmond; Joan Gorham · Jason S. Wrench · 2020
Communication, Affect, & Learning in the Classroom was original published by Virginia Richmond and Joan Gorham in 1992 and then updated a decade later by Virginia Richmond, Jason S. Wrench, and Joan Gorham in 2001. As we enter into the revision of the 3rd edition of the text, the basic content has not been drastically altered over the years. However, the research in Instructional Communication has clearly become more prominent and stronger. Probably the single most important development in the past two decades was the publication of the Handbook of Instructional Communication: Rhetorical and Relational Perspectives edited by Mottet et al. (2006). The purpose of the handbook was to synthesize the first three decades of research in instructional communication into a single volume that could help both researchers and instructors understand the value of communication in the instructional process.
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Be Credible
Peter Bobkowski; Karna Younger · Peter Bobkowski and Karna Younger · 2018
The primary audience for this book starts with students in Journalism 302: Infomania, a course we teach at the University of Kansas. When they take this class, these students usually are in their second or third semesters in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. They have varied career aspirations. A few of them want to be “traditional” journalists, writing for online news sites, magazines, or newspapers. Some of them want to be broadcast journalists. Many of them want to work in strategic communications, which encompasses public relations, advertising, marketing, and related fields.
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Tools for Podcasting
Jill Olmsted · American University · 2019
Welcome! If you’re interested in learning about the growing universe of podcasting, how it works and finding tools and inspiration to create your own podcast, this online resource is for you. My focus is on audio podcasting and this practical guide will help you navigate the technology and best practices in an easy-to-understand handbook. You will also find many audio and video clips that provide examples and video tutorials leading you through editing software, vocal delivery, promotion ideas and more. All videos have closed captioning and there is an extensive section on the importance of transcription of podcasts to enable web accessibility for the deaf, hearing impaired and language learning audiences. There is also an emphasis on diversity and inclusion with resources listing mentorships and employment opportunities. For even more information click on the extensive links throughout this e-book. In addition, each chapter has learning objectives and there are practice exercises in Appendix C at the end of the e-book along with additional resources about podcasting from newsletters and conferences to how-to-create tools and podcast recommendations. Podcasting is a dynamic way to use your smarts and creativity to tell stories about compelling subjects. This handbook provides instruction and tools to produce your own podcast — whether you are a professional in journalism, the arts, sciences, business or law, an activist or just someone who has a story to tell. The tools discussed are focused on keeping costs low for entry-level podcasters and designed to help anyone who wants to record, edit and distribute podcasts.