Sketching and Arrangement

One small and extremely low-prep way to include the visual in the composition classroom is through sketching.

from DexKnows

Students often seem to have difficulty with developing a logical structure for argumentative or analytical writing, and students are sometimes reluctant to change the structure they've arrived at, even if it's not the most effective one for their work. Sketching presents an alternative way of thinking about structure, especially for students who are more naturally visual thinkers, or who are reluctant to use a traditional outline.

This post describes a few easy ways to use sketching as a way for students to think about arrangement in their writing. These techniques could be used in the pre-writing or revision stage, and I also include a suggestion for using sketching in peer review.

About Mood Boards and the Composition Classroom

About Mood Boards

Mood boards, a mode borrowed from design studies, are visual compositions typically created by designers. They can serve as inspiration for the creation of a new product, and they can also facilitate communication between designers or between designers and clients (McDonagh and Denton 37).

from Apartment Therapy

Eckert and Stacey explain that mood boards

constitute descriptions of the overall aesthetic impression the items in a category should create. This can include colours, proportions, cultural connotations, and so on. Mood boards are often arranged around one central image which encapsulates the essence of that mood, with others that indicate the scope for interpretations. Some images are included purely for their visual properties, others for their cultural properties. (529)

They can be used to highlight absence as well as presence, given that they “serve to indicate a range of possibilities; their power is perhaps best understood by seeing what they exclude” (Eckert and Stacey 530). Mood boards also resist linear narrative, since “all the information is shown concurrently, in contrast to the sequential nature of verbal descriptions” (Eckert and Stacey 530).

Mood Boards and Revision

Mood Boards and Revision

Peer review or workshop is a technique frequently used in composition classes, but it seems that students often struggle giving precise feedback about classmates' writing. 

from UConn Today

I frame students' role in peer review as readers, rather than "fixers," of each others' work, and I explain that their goal should be to express to each other their experience in reading each others' drafts. To that end, I suggest that comments include things like "I got confused here because . . ." rather than "You need to change this." However, it seems that students often still struggle to give feedback that's precise and helpful, and they seem to have particular difficulty with critical feedback. I suggest using mood boards as a way to help students convey their experience of reading a peer's draft. Mood boards could be by students during peer review or included during student-instructor conferences.

Objects, Spaces, Bodies

These lessons and assignments draw upon concepts from visual rhetoric to help students become aware of the objects, spaces, and bodies that both help and hinder their writing processes. Through in-class activities and journaling, students be able to identify the elements of their environments that are especially conducive to the writing process. 

Using Mood Boards to Discuss and Analyze Voice

Because of its impressionistic, hard-to-pin-down character, discussing and analyzing voice presents challenges in the composition classroom. Mood boards, which utilize images, color, and texture, offer a nonverbal, nonlinear way of representing voice.

from Apartment Therapy

This exercise proposes using mood boards as a way to introduce discussions of voice, both in published texts and in students' own writing.This post presents two options for using mood boards to discuss voice in published work and in student drafts, though you could certainly modify any of these ideas in a number of ways to make them suit your classroom and your students.

Video, Collage, and Narrative

Lesson Context

I developed the idea to utilize digital narratives and collages in combination with a unit on personal narrative, after witnessing the trouble that many of the students in my English-100 Introduction to College Composition class faced when beginning to write in this genre. The first sequence of our English-100 curriculum is largely dedicated to writing in personal narrative, and I found that it was a skill many of the students lacked after four years spent writing five paragraph essays in high school. Many of my students faced difficulty in coming up with ideas for personal narratives and even more difficultly using descriptive, metaphorical language to make those narratives come alive.

I knew that it was essential to try and jump-start my students’ creative side and reconnect them to a more imagistic, layered, emotive narrative in order to help them better “show” and not just “tell” their narratives. I tried a number of different approaches, but one central gap or deficiency in my approach upon reflecting back, is that I did not draw enough upon visual modes and experiences to help them begin to “show” through their own words and language. It seems obvious now, but I missed incorporating these strategies into my classroom while teaching this previously. I needed to attend to the ‘visual-verbal’ skills my students already possessed in order to get them to explore and connect with this in their narratives. Through this process I also discovered the many ways digital narratives can be applied to other forms of writing as well, and I offer adaptations to address this issue at the end of my lesson sequence.

Connecting this back to our larger progress and framework, I hope to bring Shipka's understanding of composition and multimodality into my classroom as a means to ‘broaden’ and ‘cultivate’ the notions of meaning and composing that my students have. While working on my masters I had the opportunity to compose a digital narrative as an aesthetic response to The Sound and the Furry in addition to writing a critical literary essay, and this experience solidified the potential of visual strategies, collage, and narrative as a thoughtful means of critique and expression - at the end of these lesson ideas, I offer adaptations, so that this general idea can be applied to a number of different writing prompts, and as a means to explore a wind range of rhetorical devices. I hope to offer this same experience to my students through this series of activities and I hope to present this in a way that is useful to you as instructors.

Graphical Outlining

A student image-text from Glenn Russell's "Reconceptualising pedagogy: Students' hypertext stories with pictures and words"

Wally Wood's "22 Panels That Always Work"

Motivation

Traditional outlining is oftentimes a necessary evil. It is required to focus thought and determine structure, but it often constrains thinking, limits expression, and creates inflexible limits to the composition process. Comics as sequential art, on the other hand, still provide a structured narrative (since they are in sequence) but are arbitrarily extensible. Writers who are visual thinkers (which is not by any means an oxymoron) can perform a sort of remediation from their internal composition process (which might be highly idiosyncratic and multimodal) to a document that is shareable and interpretable by others. The graphical outline provides structure but not limits.

Many writers, especially young writers, are already steeped in the visual culture and semiotic landscape of comics as a mode. This fluency can be harnessed in the service of writing as a creative process. Doodling, even when combined with activities such as taking notes, is a "low stakes" task whereas traditional outlining can be "high stakes." Graphical outlining is an attempt to accomplish the same tasks as traditional outlining in the invention process, but from within the comfort zone of the writer.

Task

1. Using storyboard sheets, index cards, post it notes, or some other medium where sketching is afforded but where the order of sketches is mutable, begin drawing brief visual vignettes that relate to the writing prompt. Each storyboard or index card is a "panel."
2. After creating many short vignettes, a few long vignettes, or some quantity in between, begin placing them in an order.
3. Begin an inquiry into structure. What vignettes tie into other vignettes? Are there panels that in retrospect "belong" elsewhere?
4. Begin filling in the structure by creating transition panels to tie together the vignettes.
5. Repeat the previous steps, refining both the overall structure and the actual artwork of the panels involved. The refinement of artwork should be associated with the refinement of the structure of the narrative. Sketchier initial ideas are literally sketchy on paper.

Potential Pitfalls

A coherent, compelling visual narrative is not necessarily the same as a coherent, compelling written narrative. In fact often the two modes are opposed in how they depict a sequence. One could provide many examples of a fiction piece where the "twist" was something visual about a character (say, the character's appearance) or equally a piece where hiding a verbal fact (say, the character's name) is vital to the narrative. Since the modes have different sets of affordances, what works in one mode may not work in the other.

Similarly, just as the written outline might be stultifying or confining for some writers, the graphical outline might be even more confining (for instance for an artist who takes particular pride in one of the panels and so can't bear to scrap it from the visual narrative, even if it no longer meshes well with the remaining panels).

Potential Rewards

For visual thinkers the traditional process of outlining might be a chore. The goal with graphical outlining is not just to recontextualize the process, but to make the process fundamentally multimodal. If new modes have new affordances, they must also promote different styles of thought. A key step in the composition process is this winnowing and structuring of thought. The more frameworks which are available to assist, the more avenues for success that exist.

The process of sketching is inherently gestural; this ability to gesture (and thus not "commit" to a particular shape or composition) is key for maintaining flexibility in a structural sense. It also provides evidence of progress, even for unsuccessful approaches. One common problem with written outlining (most of which occurs on the computer) is that the process of revision is usually a process of deletion. It is possible to work for hours and have nothing to show for it but a blank Word document. Leaving a graphical trail of panels (many of which may be finished artifacts in and of themselves) provides a sense of progress and momentum not reflected in more traditional workflows.

Draw Aloud

Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just sparked, very brightly.

(from Zak Smith's Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow)

A comic strip interpretation of a reader-submitted dream, from Jesse Reklaw's "Slow Wave"

Motivation

One step in the traditional revision process is the "talk aloud," where the writer will read their work aloud. The oral presentation of prose will often highlight flaws that are obscured in the written presentation, particularly flaws of pacing and tone. Even grammar mistakes are often caught by this talk aloud process (where ordinarily the reader might skip over or skim sections where errors might be found, it is impossible to "skim" a work aloud). In the peer setting the oral engagement of a speaker in another's work both contributes to a shared ownership in the piece as well as forcing a deeper exploration of tone and pathos.

If oral presentation of written text is useful for the revision process due the different affordances of orality, the visual ought to have a similar utility. Problems in pacing, inconsistencies in description, and problems of flow are all highlighted by sequential art. Just as the speaker in a talk aloud can't help but read sections that would normally be skimmed during reading, the drawer can't help but visualize the structure and content of prose in a draw aloud.

Task

1. Given a draft of a written work, compose a sequential art interpretation of the work. This work can either be a literal comic strip of the narrative of the piece, or merely samples from sequential parts of the narrative. The objective is ekphrasis, not slavish depiction.
2. Look for oddities in the comic. If it's a narrative piece, do characters and events abruptly appear or disappear? Are entities at certain parts of the comic drawn in ways that contradict later appearances, or later descriptions? Are there panels which are tonally very distinct from their neighbors? These oddities in the comic are often diagnostic of problems in the original text.
3. Revise your work.
4. Repeat the process, but with a peer reviewer as the artist. Where are the two comics in conflict (not merely different, which would be expected, but contradictory). The rhetorical appeal of the work may survive this change in medium.

Potential Pitfalls

The "Slow Wave" comic above solicts dreams from readers, and then attempts to draw comics representing the elements of those dreams. Even though by definition (barring commitment to some sort of Jungian metaphysics) there is no overarching narrative to the dreams of randomly selected readers. And yet, in Slow Wave, multiple comics will often form a cohesive (but not necessarily rational) narrative, with characters appearing in consecutive dreams. The act of placing the visual in sequence seems to provoke the sense-making project, and makes the creation of narrative easy, even in non-narrative spaces.

Potential Rewards

Habitually combining the visual with the written during the revision process will bring make the visual present to hand during the writing and revision process. Comics allow for temporal flows and visual depictions that would be impossible or at least very difficult with the written word alone. Incorporating the visual after the drafting process has begun, rather than before it, also keeps the focus on text as product, preventing some visual ideas from staying visual rather than making their way back to the text.