"Imagery" by C. Kelly
How visuals are so important in literature with text and visuals together
People all over the world are "visual learners" (including me), meaning people learn better with visuals, seeing what they are hearing and learning. A lot of the time visuals are much more appealing and visually entertaining to the eye as well, which is why they are so effective in the learning process. A good example is learning dense/detailed information, such as in kinesiology. (I’m taking this class right now, so I have experienced this material.) Reading and hearing kinesiology material can be hard to understand, and many of the names sound and are spelled very similarly; so in the text book and in class lectures they include several diagrams/images to show and see where and how body parts function. Looking at black and white text with all of this information can be educating, but once a visual is added things really start to click, which is exactly how I went about this e-chapter, comparing only text with text with visuals. I did research online to learn about visual learners and what makes visuals helpful to the brain. I also used material from my kinesiology text book, like text and diagrams. Lastly, I drew my own visuals and used Microsoft Word to write my essay. What I learned was although visuals help tremendously along side text and bring more attention to text, visuals just can’t seem to express and give exact meaning like text can. Texts and visuals come “hand in hand,” and the two together create a narrative. Text is the platform of all communication like letters, conversations, etc., but trying to do it in visuals is nearly impossible. In the future I’m going to pay even more attention to how often I rely on visuals and to further compare plain black and white text to text with visuals/diagrams/pictures. This comparison between text and visuals has opened many doors, trying to make visuals a top priority in literature. I’d like people to use this information to help them realize what kind of learners they are and maybe look at visuals differently in literature.
Peace's perspective on "Imagery"
Reading involves a huge amount of visual perception; children’s books in particular often take great advantage of how images can affect what we read. C. Kelly has developed a project that looks in depth at how visual images can change how we interpret text and how visuals can serve as a greater means of communication when juxtaposed with the appropriate text. During the course of the class in which visuals were composed, Kelly cites different authors works as inspirational in the subject matter, specifically Steve McCaffery’s “use of different text types and styles” in Evoba and Karen Clippinger’s visual diagrams and anatomical pictures in Dance Anatomy and Kinesiology. Kelly’s project evolved over the semester very much like a plan for making a map; there was a key idea, the information that was researched was the map itself, and the rest of the ideas followed subsequently as titles and altitude markings. But what I found interesting was that towards the end, the subject of Kelly’s research was not only how visual learners read text; it was also how much visual images could replace or become interdependent with the relevant text. Visuals helped me to examine how I look at text, much the same way that the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 did in a more ironic way. More importantly, I really appreciated how easy it was to navigate Kelly’s plan. Being a visual learner as well as a student in a kinesthetic field, Kelly’s project is a useful source of information and personal feedback.
