George, Diana. “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing.” College Composition and Communication 52.1 (September 2002): 11-39.
Diana George discusses the importance of bringing issues of visual literacy into the writing classroom. Primarily, George addresses the history of the visual within the field of composition studies from the 1940’s to the present. She claims that due to the history of composition studies, we have limited the possibilities for the visual in the teaching of writing. Reflecting on some examples of interesting student work George claims: “The work of these students and others like them has convinced me that current discussions of visual communication and writing instruction have only tapped the surface of possibilities for the role of visual communication in the composition class” (George 2002:12) She says: “Our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address” (12)
It is not part of my project to actually argue that the visual and the verbal and the aural etc. are the same—or that meaning making and taking is done in the same way through each mode. But what I do claim is that aesthetic engagement can happen in a text/experience and that engagement doesn’t necessarily rely on any particular mode of experience (visual, verbal, aural, etc). To clarify, I don’t spend a lot of time separating verbal aesthetic engagement from visual aesthetic engagement. It needs to take a more holistic look at the possibilities for aesthetic engagement before it can do that….and I don’t think it is necessary to do that anyway. I believe it would be counter-productive to separate them in that way.
Attention visual rhetoric people! This comment of George’s must be addressed:
“Within the tradition of verbal/visual communication I am outlining here, only certain kinds of “visual” assignments seem possible for a writing course. Primarily, these would be assignments that use visual images as prompts for essay writing” (George 2002: 20).
