On Visualization and Writing

Most composition instructors aren’t intimately familiar with the world of architectural design, or design of any sort, yet in your composition class you may have students who aspire to these disciplines. Marvin Malecha, dean of the College of Design at North Carolina State University, offers an important insight into this field, one that translates easily to the composition classroom. He proposes that the student who is always doodling, the visual artist or the distracted cinema/media studies aspirant, can be led by the pictures into the words, and that the visual can be a gateway for them into great writing.