Fiendishly Difficult Short Form

When Janina Wildfeuer, my Groningen colleague, asked me to write a paper for her research topic on Frontiers, I didn’t know what I let myself in for. Pressed for time and badly wanting to contribute, I opted for a type of paper called ‚perspectives‘, which allowed me 3,000 words. Bad enough that my paper was to be about ‚multimodal argumentation‘, a subject in itself complex and rife with controversy. I also wanted to combine two tasks: review existing models for argument reconstruction and outline a few ‚perspectives‘ for future work. I ended up counting the words after each new paragraph, but after much agony and deliberation I managed to finish exactly on target.

I am very glad that my paper, entitled ‚Fresh perspectives on multimodal argument reconstruction‘ was very favorably received by the reviewer and quickly made its way into publication. I am indebted to Dimitris Serafis who reviewed my text with great insight and care, which gave me some useful ideas to improve the initial draft. I also owe great thanks to the editor of the RT, Claudia Lehmann, who did an excellent job guiding me through the process. Finally, the first initiative for the paper came from the 2023 ICOM call for a special panel in honor of John Bateman, the long-time spiritus rector of multimodality studies. I consider myself lucky to have been part of this venture, which – in addition to Janina and Claudia – also involved Tamara Drummond. The RT ‚Drawing Multimodality’s Bigger Picture: Matalanguages and Corpora for Multimodal Analyses‘ has 11 publications so far, and counting.