Introduction
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Some people write badly as a result
of applying visual thinking inappropriately to writing. The resulting
mismatch between visual thinking and writing produces characteristic,
recurring writing problems. Some who write this way are accomplished
visual thinkers and successful professionals, others are visually-talented
students struggling to survive "the verbal bias of schooling"
(Olson, 1977b). If teachers recognize that certain writing problems
result from a strength misapplied, they may be able to help train
the visual thinkers who will be so important in the technologies
of the near future. Note 1.
Some visual thinkers do not have difficulty writing. They are
able to shift between the mode of visual thinking and the mode
of verbal thinking, or to use both at once. Conversely, some
writers have learned to incorporate visual thinking into their
writing process, into the images of their prose, or into the
illustrations that accompany their articles. Others appear to
specialize in visual thinking without carrying out the kind of
verbal thinking required for analytical, expository prose; that
group is the subject of this paper. Whenever I refer to "visual
thinkers," understand that to mean "those visual thinkers
who have difficulty writing."
This paper is the result of sustained speculation, based on years
of teaching writing, observations of visual thinkers, and a review
of the literature; it is grounded in a pilot study of three dozen
master's exams written (without editorial assistance) by interior
design students and a study of a collection of papers by college
undergraduates in architecture. Examples cited in the text come
from this study, which I use not as proof, but as illustration
of the line of exploratory thought developed here.
I trace the writing problems of visual thinkers to three factors:
- a lack of words,
- unfamiliarity with the kind of analysis that leads to the
logical sequencing of prose, and
- difficulty understanding that context must be communicated.
Table 1 summarizes the
writing problems this paper explains as the result of misapplying
visual thinking to expository prose.
The problem of defining visual thinking. This paper skirts
a key difficulty--defining visual thinking--by the pragmatic
expedient of looking at the writing of students who are successfully
engaged in a course of study that is commonly assumed to require
the ability to think visually.
It also skirts the difficulty of testing for visual thinking
by accepting the respective teachers' judgment that the students
used in this study all displayed the ability to think visually
in the manner required in their course of study. It does not
discuss the complicating possiblity that visual thinkers who
have reached college or graduate school may already have modified
their thinking to accommodate the educational environment.
This is not an ideal beginning for a study, as it prevents us
from facing some rich complexities inherent in the topic. But
it was the way I was able to proceed.
For those familiar with it, this paper
presents in some detail an alternative to the widely accepted
"orality-to-literacy" explanation of writing problems
as presented by Ong, Olson, and their followers. It also supports
an alternative to the conclusion of developmental thinkers (Inhelder
& Piaget, 1958) that non-verbal modes of thought occur early
in life and are naturally superceded by verbal literacy and abstract
thinking in the teen years. Note
2.
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