Apparatus: Bernhardt

Author/Title:

Stephen A. Bernhardt: Seeing the Text

Sample Questions:

Before You Read

●      Look at (but don’t read) a piece of writing printed in a newspaper, magazine, news website, or blog. Take notes about the visual aspect of how the writing is presented. Do any images accompany the article? Do you see any charts or tables? Are there any headings or lists?

Example:

 (sorry, I'm not that adept at screenshots yet...)

The Onion "America's finest news source" web site has a clean, news-paper like layout. We see headings, titles, text that accompanies pictures, advertisements, etc. It is colorful and I definitely want to read (and believe) everything they post.

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1.       Bernhardt characterizes the typical classroom essay as consisting of “full, declarative sentences, arranged in paragraphs with low visual identity” (36). Do you struggle with generating or reading this conventional, low-visual type of writing? Why or why not?

Yes! it is difficult to stay focused and engaged with text that is written with "low visual identity." Case in point--the Readings of Writing text is just terrible! Even short pieces are difficult to get through because of the uniformity. The style is dense, it is just line after line after line and page after page of small fonts and nothing to attract the eye except for paragraph numbers...which only make you realize how slowly you read through the pages. I kept thinking how ironic it was that this piece on visual text was printed in the worst way possible for a reader to access!

Applying and Exploring Ideas

1.       Think of the writing projects you have been assigned to do in this course, in other college courses, or in high school. Have there been any times when you used an unconventional visual structure outside of usual essay format? How might you use visual strategies to present your writing in the future?

I think the most memorable "paper" I wrote was for a graduate Art History course--our professor encouraged us to create a piece of art work in lieu of the traditional research paper--I constructed an art zine about the appropriation of art through the ages. By the time I was finished, I constructed a piece with just as much text as a normal college length essay, but in book form with lots of pictures and symbols. I was always so proud of that zine, and not-surprisingly, it was the first time in college I was allowed to do something "non-traditional," yet it was the one piece I was more engaged in than any other--really makes me rethink how I want students to come at their research paper!

After You Read

How would Scott McCloud have represented Bernhardt’s argument?

Visually, of course! I could definitely envision McCloud creating a graphic essay for Bernhardt--using varying styles of fonts, color, pictures--actually, it would be really interesting to take several of the pieces we are reading and "McCloud-ify" them and do a controlled experiment where one set of students has the traditional essay and the other has the graphic version--both would be given the same set of questions to answer, and then the group's answers compared to one another for depth of understanding, comprehension, and completeness or the assignment. I don't think it would surprise any of us to find that the group with the visually dynamic set would appear to learn more thoroughly. This really begs the questions then, why do we insist on keeping our homogeneous formats??