"No"

I agree with you. I wouldn't accept them either, certainly not without comment and correction. And yet, perhaps a typical academic paper, exclusively printed in 12-point courier text, is not the only kind of document we should be envisaging for our students' assignments. In the interest of effective communication, there is surely a timely, appropriate place for alternatives like abbreviations and split infinitives. Now that everyone is a desktop publisher, we should especially be enlarging our instructional purview in order to explore the visual logic that governs graphic design on paper and on the screen, and the balance, as Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton put it in their Web Style Guide, between sensation and information (53). Certainly, those of us who teach in and about webbed environments must take seriously the research-based advice of Jakob Neilsen of SunSoft Science Office and of others about the visual components of writing for the web. For instance, Good Reasons includes a chapter on "Effective Web Design," although Seeing & Writing ignores such principles completely. 

To teach visual literacy is to help students learn the appropriate principles, concepts, and analytical categories, like shape, color, form, pattern, fonts, space, dimension, perspective, focus, and many others. It is also to assign structured opportunities for students to apply this technology of visual critique, that is, assignments that guide students through an analysis of images with corresponding written drafts expressing these analyses. Such rigorous instruction is quite different from just looking at and emoting about pictures.

If you are still inclined to dismiss all this as a fad and just try to wait it out, please note that concern for visual literacy, if increasingly urgent, is still nothing new. Indeed, there is an International Visual Literacy Association offering appropriate linked resources, including a definition, "What is Visual Literacy?" from Visual Literacy, Language and Learning, published by Arizona State University as long ago as 1978.

If, on the other hand, you are hesitant about including such instruction in graphic design because you feel that you don't know enough yourself about such matters, I sympathize. After years spent in graduate school studying literary texts like "Ode to a Nightingale" or "Letters from Lord Chesterfield to His Son," it seems unfair that we are now expected to swat up a whole new field of visual literacy, new, at least, to many of us. But we must, if we wish to retain our campus authority to teach writing--granted, an expanded sense of writing, in this new millenium. Without question, information is increasingly conveyed through a hybrid graphic, textual interface. Like the interface, we, too, must become hybrid interdisciplinists. One excellent resource for self-instruction, in the privacy of our own homes and offices, is Charlotte Jirousek's online, interactive textbook from Cornell, "Art, Design, and Visual Thinking," for "an entry-level course . . . introducing basic design concepts and the idea of visual language." (Professor Jirousek serves this site from her own office computer, which often gets overloaded, so don't be discouraged by a temporary 404 message.) 

Wait. I'm reconsidering. Maybe I would accept them, after all, so, "Yes."

Get me back to the Re-View.

Get me back to the very beginning

by Ellen Strenski, University of California, Irvine