This rhetoric begins with the question "What is Literacy?" and invites the reader to think and write about literacy as a field of study. The study of how people become literate, the role of literacy in society, and what forms literacy takes is important in many disciplines such as English, Rhetoric, Education, Sociology, and Anthropology. In The Elements of Literacy, students are specifically asked to consider five aspects or "sites" of literacy -- the mind (cognitive studies), culture (doing ethnographic research), class (the effects of social class on literacy practices), the workplace, and digital/multimodal literacies.