Going visual
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Tried and tired, that was how I felt while retooling the Department syllabus for composition class. I wanted something that would perk me up, because that would mean I’d infect my students with my enthusiasm. But how do you inject something new to a course that has been taught year in and year out (and more often than not yielding students who still don’t know how to write).
I scoured the library shelves, tentatively thinking of assigning a textbook or two (as long as there are enough copies to go round) for my required readings, and using those textbooks as our guide throughout the coming semester.
Then I found Donald and Christine McQuade’s Seeing & Writing (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000) — and there were three copies to go around! Here was what I was looking for. A more respectable English teacher would perhaps have some reservations, as Piotr Gwiazda elaborates in his review of the textbook:
When I first looked at a review copy of Seeing & Writing, I was almost taken aback by its unapologetic focus on the visual and its more-than-usual emphasis on popular culture. As opposed to more traditional textbooks of writing, featuring difficult but thought-provoking essays on Balinese cockfights or writing as re-vision, for example, this new textbook overflows with photographs, advertisements, posters, comic strips, and art reproductions, in addition to a number of stories, poems, and compelling though suspiciously brief selections from Philip Lopate, Katha Pollit, and Susan Sontag, among others. It has been noted and argued that the proliferation of visual images in contemporary culture has significantly reduced our students’ ability to read closely, in a linear fashion, with an eye for depth and complexity rather than speed and superficiality. Seeing & Writing seemed to me a strange and disturbing validation and authorization of the kind of values that composition courses to some extent attempt to counteract. Not that pandering to the actual interests of college freshmen is in itself an unworthy enterprise, but the editors of Seeing & Writing, in my initial opinion, failed to cross the line where entertainment stops and learning begins, offering a book that is colorful, flashy, accessible and, yes, interesting, though seriously lacking in its potential to cultivate students’ respect for language and thinking. Many colleagues in my department shared my alarm and skepticism.
Thank god, he tried out the book in his class:
After teaching Seeing & Writing for one semester, as an experiment of sorts, I claim that the textbook works somewhat better than it looks; I am ready to consider it a praiseworthy effort. Its focus on the relationship between the verbal and the visual proves particularly attractive to first-year college students, especially when it also happens to overlap with their own professional interests… [Read Gwiazda's review here.]
After thirteen years of teaching writing, I’ve seen how students are more visual. Most of the textbooks in writing I’ve come across fight a futile battle when editors insist that students turn their sights instead to the printed page. So I was mulling over the thought, “Why fight it? Why not embrace this visual acuity that young people seem to have acquired growing up amidst a frenzy of images?” But how?
More browsing confirmed my decision to go visual when I found another book, Robert Atwan’s Convergences: Message, Method, Medium (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002). Its publisher says of the book:
A new kind of reader highlights the way verbal and visual texts speak to each other. Essays, photographs, Web sites, poems, cartoons, stories, billboards, advertisements, paintings, monuments, maps, and album covers are grouped in clusters that cross genre and medium – a related poster, web site, essay, and poem, for example. This presentation helps students map out relationships between verbal and visual messages. This is the reader for those instructors who want their students to read and write critically about all the texts they encounter.
Six familiar themes – with a twist. “Staging Portraits” outlines the way verbal and visual portraits reveal certain details and hide others. “Telling Secrets” asks why we love to tell secrets, and what our secrets tell about us. “Shaping Spaces” explores what it means to think spatially – whether the space is a piece of paper, our room, or the World Wide Web. “Making History” traces how describing the past often means making it up. “Dividing Lines” shows how different groups of people draw lines between us and them. “Redefining Media” sketches out the evolving relationship between message, method, and medium.
Convergences introduces a new methodology for reading a wide range of verbal and visual texts, helping students to ask what, where, when, how, and why as they read and write. Why does it matter that the message be tailored for the medium? Who is this advertisement aimed at, and what is it selling? Convergences presents each new reading as the end result of conscious choices made by its creator and helps students learn to make conscious choices constructing their own texts.
Here is the answer to “how.” While Seeing & Writing focuses more on honing students’ critical skills in observing and interpreting (the writing part) visual and verbal texts, Convergences enhances these skills by engaging students in a more critical investigation of a visual or verbal text’s rhetorical methods in relation to the message it presents and the medium it uses.
Now I’m excited to try this out with my students. 
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