Mark Pedretti studies how all of the texts we encounter — public or academic, visual or written, from a tweet to a Hollywood blockbuster to a scholarly article — make arguments. He is broadly concerned with how different modes of discourse construct their objects of inquiry — how language is generative of our social world and our relations to it. His research focuses specifically on multimodal composition, the act of composing in non-alphabetic forms like images, sounds, or hypertext, and the rhetorical work that it does, as distinct from the critical inquiry often seen as the purpose of the written essay. In addition to teaching and research, Pedretti serves as the Writing Specialist and Faculty Fellow in Writing in the Center for Teaching and Learning at Providence College, where he collaborates with faculty from across the disciplines to integrate writing instruction into their courses. In his free time, he likes to cook and stare at his two cats.