Reading Response 9

Bernhardt – “Seeing the Text”

Summary

In his article, “Seeing the Text,” Bernhardt attempts to show the relationship that the visual points of text have on people when they read them. He argues that how something is set up graphically will lead to different ways of understanding as well as different levels in interest toward the material and can also be traced to the audience that the text is geared toward.

Synthesis

This article is a lot like Klein’s as well as Elbow’s, because it is written for a more academic audience. He throws a couple of bones in that are more for students, but the majority is very high level. It is also structured in a very scientific pattern, laying out all of the evidence and then results.

Pre-reading

No, none of my other classes have me do lab reports or organize text with images. If I were to, the visual clues would help narrow down the details that the text may have a hard time to describe to the reader.

QD

4. It is normal to have a teacher want us to write a paper that follows a specific form because then everyone has to write the same way and it is a lot easier to judge and grade the student’s work. When you have it as an assignment, it gets rid of different student’s interpretations and has only the teacher’s interpretation as the valid one, so there is a more linear grading system.

A&E

1. There may have been times that I’ve had to use unconventional visual structure, such as in my high school chemistry classes where it was structured more as a list in some parts. To use them again would only be beneficial in a science field, since most English teacher’s will want the generic essay, but if asked for it won’t be a difficult thing to do.

Post-reading

McCloud would have had a diagram for each paragraph, showing each part that he was talking about. I think this way would’ve been much easier to understand, because instead of having to both understand him and visualize his visuals, you would only have to understand the concept.

MM

In the context of looking at graphs and charts would probably be the most common case. Pamphlets and newspapers are also set up visually, as they have pictures and aren’t a wall of text. I couldn’t say what assignment calls for the most visual thinking, but the readings of McCloud and Berger apply since they involve art and images, not in that order.

Thoughts

This article was dreadfully boring, and aside from McCloud’s work, it doesn’t appear to apply to much of what we are doing in this class. His vocabulary, like many of the others that we have read, is unnecessarily complicated and circuitous, and merely confuses the reader rather than informing them.