"The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers"

by Gerald Grow

School of Journalism, Media & Graphic Arts

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee FL 32307 USA

Available: http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow

I. The Lack of Words

Visual thinkers who have writing problems use words in an imprecise sense for the simple reason that words don't matter. The real thought is taking place in another dimension. Note 3. 1. The man known as the 'Genius' of architects is accredited with the destruction of the 'box' in architecture. 2. The designers and craftsmen of this period are also to be attributed with interjecting human comfort and scale as an important feature of the furnishings. 3. Since many people come from many parts of the world, the United States is compromised of many people from many nations. [The same writer later calls expulsion from a professional society "dismemberment".] Words have such little relevance to visual thinkers that they often do not even name the things they talk and write about. They use vague terms like it, this, that, and thing, along with vague pronoun references--as in this example: I feel that it is up to the individual designer to decide which is the best direction for him to take. As far as its implications on the profession, it could be a good thing, in that a client may feel more confident in his designer choice for a particular job if he is specialized in that area. On the other hand, it could be negative if a client liked the work a designer did for him on a commercial job and wanted him to do a residential job and the designer refused. The passage points instead of naming.Almost nothing is specified: "up to the individual;" "the best direction;" its implications;" "a good thing;" "a particular job;" "could be." Note that the last two him's in this passage refer to different people--not a problem in a visual thought, but a potential problem in writing that any editor would spot. Slips of the tongue can betray the visual thinker's tenuous relation to words. In the middle of a statement, visual thinkers sometimes insert a word which names some object in the room their sight just happened to fall upon, like this conversation in a kitchen: "Yesterday when I was driving to school, the dishwasher overheated and I had to stop at a service station." Note 4 In a conversational pattern I often observe, a visual thinkers stop in mid-sentence, stumped for a word: They can see it but not say it. Teachers could accuse such students of not thinking. They are thinking, though; their thoughts just happen to arrive in visual, not verbal, form.

Absence of Analysis

The visual writer's lack of names indicates the absence of the complicated habit of analysis, comparison, valuation, organization, and selective perception that leads one to have words ready to name perceptions and express thoughts-a habit essential to good writing. The thought dates to Vygotsky in the 1920s: "The independent elements in a visual field are simultaneously perceived; in this sense, visual perception is integral. Speech, on the other hand, requires sequential processing. Each element is separately labeled and then connected in a sentence structure, making speech essentially analytical." (1978, p. 33, his italics) Naming is an analytical process. We use words so naturally that this thought may not at first seem significant, but it is crucial. Prior to naming, a thinker must carry out a process of analyzing "things" into "component parts" and "relationships" so that distinct concepts exist which can be named. Further, naming requires commitment: To name something is to engage a particular theory of the world as context and to assert, in that context, the thing one names. Merely using a word often commits one to a vast interrelationship of assumptions and values--which is either a roadmap or a quagmire, depending on the verbal ability of the speaker. What we name are not things, but the analytical concepts by which we relate to the world. Writing magnifies the analyzing and categorizing functions of the mind: "All writing fosters categorical thinking and analysis, because analysis is built into the very act of writing. Writing is a technology for dividing the world into categories" (Bolter, 1991, p. 209). And, we add, giving names to those categories. Every good writer builds and maintains a mental network in which every known word exists in relationship to similar terms, contrasting terms, homonyms, etymological roots, contexts of meaning, dialects, appropriate settings, etc., and where words are related by not only by shades of meaning but by rhythm, rhyme, and reference to history, literature, and experience--including non-verbal experience: "Semantic memory is the memory necessary for the use of language. It is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person possess about words and other verbal symbols, their meaning and referents, about relations among them, and about rules, formulas, and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts, and relations." Tulving (1972, pp. 385-386). Drawing upon the rich, dynamic, intricately interlinked vocabulary that they have developed as their "inner thesaurus," good writers choose words from a wealth of possibilities. Note 5 By contrast, visual thinkers often use a word as if they had no choice: It seems to be the only word available. Visual thinkers may use a word as if the word had no opposite, stood in contrast to nothing else, and had no shadings of meaning that differentiated it from similar words. At those times, the visual thinker's words have a prophetic quality; they seem to come directly from the mind of God and imply that if you don't understand them, the fault is your own. Lacking a sure sense of how words relate to one another and what those contrasting groups of words mean to other people, visual thinkers may use broad, vague words, or they may use common words in an arbitrary, eccentric manner, as if words were colors and they were creatively decorating a room. In this sense, they are more eccentric in word use than are oral thinkers, who gravitate to socially-shared meanings. Note 6 When asked about such usage, visual writers tend to say something like, "Oh, that's just what I use the word to mean," as if words, like colors, had no public meanings but could be freely redefined to express the private purposes of the author. Visual thinkers sometimes treat language like decor.

Words as Labels of Unseen Pictures

The words of visual thinkers often make more sense if you consider them not as the exposition of a verbal, logical idea, but as labels for unseen pictures. Such thinkers may use a few key words repeatedly, without elaboration, as if each word contained and powerfully expressed a complex thought in its entirety. The reader, though, sees only the words and does not have the writer's mental pictures that are necessary to convey the real meaning. The words are cryptic. The best visual writers are mysterious and evocative; the worst are simply incomprehensible. Often, simple grammatical errors take on a different meaning when considered as products of misapplied visual thinking. Consider the misuse of "it" in the following sentence: Open office systems have too many demonstrable advantages for any employee not to consider it favorably. "It" would normally be considered a simple error in number that fails to match the plural "systems" with its proper referent "them" (rather than the singular, "it"). Seen as the writing as a visual thinker, however, "it" makes sense when understood as referring to an "it" that is an unspoken, visualizable unit of thought that stands for the thought: "the process of making the change to open office systems."

Fear of Words

Lack of words and lack of the analytical process which makes words available may not be a defect, but a deliberate achievement. Because words interfere with many nonverbal processes, some nonverbal thinkers fear them. Impinged upon by language, a visual thinker (or dancer or potter or painter) may feel like the caterpillar who could not walk for thinking about it. Words alone may not be the problem so much as words that trigger an invasive analytical consciousness which imposes combative categories upon activities which function much better as unverbalized skills or feelings. Nonverbal thinkers may fear the very states of mind that Ong, in a bittersweet moment, attributes to fully-developed literate thinking: "Writing is a particularly pre-emptive and imperialist activity that tends to assimilate other things to itself." (Ong, 1982, p. 12). "Writing introduces division and alienation" (p. 179) "Moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world" (p. 15). "The spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups Writing and print isolate" (p. 74). "Writing separates the knower from the known" (p. 105). Given accounts like this, perhaps we should all fear the consequences of a hyperliteracy that has not been "properly interiorized" so that it "does not degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it" (Ong 1982, p. 83). Persons whose natural nonverbal talents and worldly skills can be "degraded" by improperly interiorized verbal, analytical thought have reason to fear having their minds "colonized" by the imbalanced form of literacy emphasized in schools. Such persons might include not only visual thinkers, but mothers, artists and craftspersons, kinesthetic male first-graders, inarticulate persons with highly developed interpersonal sensitivities, and others. Many people prefer to deal with their crafts or relationships intuitively and do not like to talk about what they do. Indeed, some activities, perceptions, and kinds of thinking may work better in the absence of words (Weschler's 1982 biography of American artist Robert Irwin is titled with a quote from Paul Valery: Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees). Visual thinkers work in regions of the mind where words are not essential and may be intrusive (Franck, 1973). They often engage in activities which focus not on words but on such non-verbal values as line, color, texture, balance, proportion, aesthetic experience, and the manipulation of objects. Similarly, students of many kinds may resist the full achievement of school literacy for fear of losing their preliterate selves--including a sense of innocent wholeness, connection with their culture of origin, pleasurable embodiment in immediate experience, and the simple ability to stop thinking. (Rodriguez, 1981, gives an account of the loss of personal and cultural identity due to education.) In order to gain the trust of such learners, teachers must be prepared to teach them how to keep from being enslaved by the specialized analytical thought processes that (as Ong has vividly described) are so greatly empowered by writing. This conclusion harks back to Arnheim's plea for an larger role for art in education (1969, p. 3) and goes against the current idea (implicit in Ong, Olson and many other writers about literacy) that students must give up the perceptual richness of their local culture to achieve the peculiar analytic isolation of high literate culture. Surely we should be seeking a way, after 300 years of the widespread use of tightly logical expository prose Note 7 and some 2500 years of text-oriented thinking Note 8 to domesticate literacy in the service of human wholeness.

Stacking, Packing, and Enfolding Words

The analytical process that underlies expository prose enables the writing to be a succession of discrete words, told in a careful order, with their relationships spelled out. Visual thinking allows for many elements to appear at once, simultaneously, interpenetrating with one another, with relationships that may be more evocative than specific. Consider the drawing to the left, which was inspired by a multilayered figure in a wonderful painting by the Amazonian visionary, Pablo Amaringo. In it, boat, sun, man, eye, water, and sky enfold into one another. What is the drawing saying? -- You cannot tell; it doesn't tell. The drawing portrays distinct symbols, yet their relationship and meaning are left unexplained. Is it perhaps saying that a spiritual eye, more powerful than the sun, watches over each person's passage across the river of life? Yet, is the watching eye altogether friendly? Is it safe? Or is this someone struggling to meet the glare of an unforgiving judge? It could be a reference the Buddha's parable of his teachings as a raft to be used, then discarded when the goal is reached. It could be an evocation of the moment when the labor of creative work suddenly puts you in touch with something much larger than yourself, and it creates through you. But the drawing, like all visual thoughts, is silent. It does not interpet itself in words. When a visual thought is enfolded with enough significance and wonder, it becomes "visionary." A single visionary experience may compact enough layers of meaning to occupy a person for many years. Another example of meaning enfolded in a drawing in a non-linear manner. I argue throughout this paper that visual thinking works like this drawing-- simultaneous, enfolded, interconnected, open to multiple approaches-- while verbal thinking analyzes, names, and spells out meanings much more explicitly. Because many elements can appear at once in visual thinking, the visual writer may try to make many elements occur at once in writing -- trying to stack words, as it were, on top of each other, layering them, enfolding word within word, thought within thought, the way elements in a picture may be enfolded into one another. The visual thinker may try to network words multidimensionally, as if a page of print had the capabilities of hypertext or the multiplicity of meanings inherent in dreams and myths. Instead of specifying and defining the subject, the words of a visual thinker tend to radiate out into multiple meanings. Single words may overlap with several different thoughts, expressing none of them separately. In this sense, visual thinkers don't write so much with words in alignment as worlds in collision. The resulting ambiguity does not arise from the absence of gesture or oral context (as the orality argument would have it); it arises as the writer tries to force the newer technology of text to use the older logic of visual thinking. The result can be prose that requires interpretation; indeed, not even the writer has interpreted this prose. Such words arrive on the page like suitcases at the baggage claim: You know there is something in them and they have travelled far, but you cannot tell what the writer means. The words are filled with unstated meaning. They are (the term is Ricoeur's) "packed" and need unpacking. This method of using language, however, is not always a defect; radiantly evocative words have long been the language of myth, mysticism, and love. Also, in earlier centuries, educated readers expected to interpret writing on several different levels at once (e.g., literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical or spiritual), so that multiple meanings were the norm. This was before the era of clear, expository, fully-explicit prose. Visual thinkers are accustomed to their own kind of interpreting; the very act of visual perception, as Gregory (1966, 1970) and Gombrich (1959) have shown, is interpretive. When oral thinkers leave you to guess at something they have written, it is usually something that would have been obvious had the writing been a conversation. Such is not the case with visual thinkers, even whose spoken words can be mysterious references to visual thoughts invisible to anyone but the thinker. Writing done in this "packed" manner makes more sense when read as poetry than when read as prose. In a wonderful exercise, Couture (1986, p. 86) showed that such "elliptical" prose is easier to read when typed as free verse. In that form, the reader does not expect the prose to be fully explicit in spelling out its meanings. The reader expects to interpret, to make connections, to leap across gaps. But when elliptical prose represents itself as explicit prose, it fails to communicate. Students who write this way in college classes may fail in the assignment. Many are, I suspect, visual thinkers struggling with the mental technology of writing--especially assigned essays in fully elaborated, analytical, expository prose.

Difficulty with Description

One might expect visual thinkers to excel at description. But when visual thinkers have difficulty writing, their descriptions are especially static, unmoving, repetitive, and difficult to assimilate, precisely because the visual thinker does not "dramatize" description in the form a narrative, but "stacks" descriptive elements into a pile of details too large to keep in mind at once (this point was argued by Lessing as early as 1766). Readers can grasp only a few unrelated elements at once (psychologist George Miller reached the well known conclusion that we can remember five, plus or minus two, unrelated items). But in a picture, say, of a face, a multitude of separate elements can be expressed within a larger visual whole. Accomplished writers create comparable wholes-they call them "narratives," "story forms," "theories," "logical progressions," "outlines," or "organizing metaphors"- inside which a large number of distinct elements become comprehensible because they are related to a central pattern. Visual thinkers, accustomed to unifying patterns of a spatial kind, need to learn to create unifying devices of the kind writers use. In some cases, the visual habit of thinking in multiple meanings -- stacking -- may cause the author to unintentionally fuse two words. Some of the resulting words would be quite creative if they were intentional. In what could be mistaken for an error in spelling, for example, one student author discussed how dimmers, timers, and light sensors can "illiminate" (eliminate + illuminate) the need for on and off switches. Another visual thinker referred to "affluential" lawyers (affluent + influential). Such "mistakes" indicate enfolded verbal thinking in which the words have not been extracted, made definite, and placed in sequential relationships. These people may be thinking clearly, but doing so with images -- and with words that have not yet been translated into expository statement.

To next section: Problems of Writing in Sequence
Contents