writing center

 

Appreciating the Visual's Role in Writing in the Disciplines

Resources About
Using the Visual

Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: University of CA Press, 1969.

Visual Dictionary.
http://www.visuwords.com/

Visual WAC. Across the Disciplines (Special Issue). 2005. http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/visual/

Worley, Demetrice A. “Visual Imagery Training and College Writing Students.” Alice Glarden Brand and Richard L. Graves. Presence of Mind: Writing and the Domain Beyond the Cognitive. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1994. 133-139

by Sarah E. Baker, MA TA / WAC Assistant

When we hear the word “visual,” most of us think of images: photographs, drawings, graphs, figures, charts, etc.  And most of us, as teachers, tend to think that incorporating and addressing the visual is either already embedded in our discipline or extraneous to it.  Yet the visual, in its most expansive definition, is gaining ground in every field, especially with the ubiquitous presence of the digital realm.

Ask your students how many consider themselves visual learners and you’ll probably get a decent show of hands, maybe even yours. The students whom we notice doodling and sketching their way through classes are not always just whiling away the time until dismissal. They may be engaging the material in a different mode.

In a recent exercise I assigned in English 101 on  different ways of note-taking, I was surprised that the majority of students stressed the importance of having a choice of writing surfaces, such as lined and unlined paper.  They wanted a way to accommodate their own different learning styles depending on their mood, type of class, and/or field of study.

Across the disciplines, teaching writing can be a challenge, but using visuals is one approach that may smooth the way.  The definition of writing is also changing and expanding to include multimedia composition, which inevitably includes the visual.  At the same time, many disciplines that incorporate the visual, such as the sciences and arts, don’t often consider the visual elements as tools that can help teach writing. 

As teachers, showing students that we are aware of and pay attention to the overwhelmingly visual world we all live in, that we incorporate visuals in more traditional text-based classes, and that they need to pay attention to the presentation of visual elements both in and out of the classroom  can only help us prepare our students for the world beyond the classroom.

See Sarah E. Baker's exercises for using the visual in different disciplines.