Chapter 5: Multi-Modal Composition: What Counts as Writing?

Seeing the Text

STEPHEN A. BERNHARDT

Bernhardt, Stephen A. “Seeing the Text.” College Composition and Communication 37.1 (Feb. 1986): 66 –78. Print.

Framing the Reading

You may be struck by Steve Bernhardt’s inclusion of the “wetlands fact sheet” because it is a black-and-white line drawing, with a typewriter-like main font. Where, you might wonder, is the color? Lush images? Complex layers with text flowing over watermarked background graphics or images? It’s a far cry from a Web page or an app screen. Ironically, Bernhardt’s readers in 1986 would have been equally surprised, but in the opposite direction: Many of them would never have seen so “designed” and visual a layout for a print document outside of an advertisement (the most graphically intensive texts of the time). And they would have been blown away at the thought that such a page design could be produced on a desktop computer (rather than in a specialized printer’s office)—the technology to print multiple fonts, to incorporate graphics in a text document, to do a columned layout, all from one’s own computer, was both rare and expensive in 1985, when Bernhardt was drafting his piece. What looks to us quite basic today was to many readers of thirty years ago mindboggling.

You might, then, logically wonder how such an article on visual literacy is of much use to today’s readers, reflecting as it does technology invented when your grandparents ran the world. When you read carefully, you’ll understand its value to our collection—how it remains able to speak to readers about principles of visual design from a generation away. Its ideas are that central, that fundamental, to the graphical layout of mixed-mode alphabetic texts.

Key among these are the ideas of gestalt, equilibrium, horizontal and vertical axes, good continuation, closure, similarity, and expanded sentences (all of which are defined in the article and as such don’t appear in our glossary). What Bernhardt does is talk not about how documents should look, recognizing explicitly that this quality will continue to evolve as technology and tastes do, but rather what principles underlie pleasing and usable design, given how human brains appear to encounter images and process information. This strategy has given his article a focus that, if not timeless (rhetorical theory suggests nothing really is), has certainly remained fresh and relevant in the years since the article was published, even throughout vast technological evolution.

Bernhardt began studying rhetoric and technical writing while earning his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan after teaching high school in the 1970s. Throughout his career as a professor, which culminated as an endowed professor of writing at the University of Delaware, Bernhardt has researched writing in technical and scientific fields such as engineering, military science, medicine, nursing, and pharmaceuticals, as well as studying writing itself from a technological perspective, particularly focusing on graphic design in writing (like this article) and on software that assists writing and writing instruction.