The use of visuals in the writing classroom asks students to engage in deep acts of composition as they translate what they know about words, texts and ideas into images. Visual assignments have the potential to draw students into traditional acts of composition such as invention, arrangement, style, and delivery. They get them to think deeply about their rhetorical situation – their purposes, audiences, and subjects. Although many recent classroom methods concentrate on the analysis of visual images, I like to extend that to include the production of visuals in conjunction with the written word.

Most of my students have grown up in a conservative, rural area of Oklahoma, where children are still taught to be seen and not heard. Consequently, we sometimes have difficulty getting our students to talk, let alone write. I have found Seeing & Writing a wonderful textbook for teaching students how to make connections, not only between visual images and the written word, but also from media to the culture surrounding them.

The introduction to Chapter 5, one entry within the chapter, “Visualizing Composition: Audience,� and Jesse Gordon’s Op-Art “What is America?� from Chapter 7 in Seeing & Writing frame assignments I use with English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) composition students.