Re: Thinking, Teaching, Writing

Digital story-telling: Notes and links

I'm posting here some info to supplement a mini-presentation about my first experiments with using digital story-telling in my classes--in case I don't have time or presence of mind to fit in everything I want to say (both likely situations!). Btw I'm not much of a photographer, and I've never videotaped anything or experimented with any video editing software.

Two recent introductions.

At a local conference last spring, I attended a presentation of digital story-telling, where the presenter argued the important of images in crafting arguments (editorials = old school; 21st century = viral video). As evidence, he showed this:

and then invited us to play around with some PC version (can't remember the name).

Then I started the MOOC MOOC in August, a weeklong bootcamp for people who wanted to play around with some digital stuff, and one of the first "assignments" (before I got buried) was to make a 60-second video about where learning happens. I had no idea what I was doing really, but came up finally with this:

 

My reasons for trying it out with my English 101 classes:

• It was more fun and much easier than I'd expected.
• Both the Dove video and my own convinced me how much composition these things require.
• It seemed a good way for students to explore a topic (and appropriate for visual learners, of course).
• I thought I'd try it out as a group activity, both to speed up the process and to encourage student interaction (with the more tech-saavy students helpingout the less confident)--and I didn't really know how easy/difficult students would find it.
• And another main reason: I was teaching in our new computer labs!!

Counterargument/concerns.

My main concern was whether I could justify taking the time away from traditional writing (or, is this a luxury if students are having difficulty writing focused, coherent, developed essays?)

But this might be offset by

• increased engagement with research topic (so making a video can become part of "prewriting" stage)
• possibility to use this as metaphor for composition (look at parallels between composition of video and essay, as I use descriptive writing to make connection between specific details and central impression more concrete): selection and ordering of details, pacing,  transitions, revision process, etc.
• opportunity to ask students to write about choices made (or some other topic related to video topic or process)--see Traci Gardner's post on A Justification for Composing with Video

My approach this semester. My English 101 this semester was organized around three habits of mind (from the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing): curiosity, creativity, and persistence (CCP, I soon started calling it, the three of which, in my mind anyway, seemed to link neatly to the stages of invention, drafting, and revision). Students started with a personal essay based on an experience that tied to one of CC or P. For a second, in-class assignment, I grouped students by the "habit" they'd chosen, so curiosity folks were grouped with other curiosity folks, and so forth. I gave groups fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of one class to plan for the next class, when they'd have an hour and fifteen minutes to compose a 60-second video that in some way illustrated their "habit" (I wrote about the experience here).

Tech options. There are many (bewilderingly many!) options for free web-based video-editing tools, but the free versions usuallyrestrict length of video to 30 seconds or at most 60 seconds. Animoto and flixtime were frequenlty mentioned, but I ended up with stupeflix (unfortunate name!) because it seemed easy to use and with a $120 educator's license I could get accounts for 200 students so that they could make unlimited-length videos they could then post to youtube.

How to do it. It's a very straightforward process: choosing a theme (or my favorite option: no theme), uploadingsome photos and/or video, dragging and dropping to re-arrange, adding title slides (if desired), and choosing background music. (Here's a link to a few "video-editing tutorials for the technically challenged.") For my own video, I figured out after a bit of messing around, how to record a voice-over narration with audacity; with my usual seat-of-the-pants approach, the most challenging part was figuring out the timing to match slide duration to timing in my audio file. I assume more sophisticated video-editors such as iMovie make audio-editing easier.

Results. Students seemed to enjoy it--only a few had tech problems. The variety of approaches fascinated me: several groups used phones to videotape short scenes; others brought in personal photos; one group set off to take pictures. Copyright issues were a problem, though: I had intended that students only use Creative Commons-licensed photos, but that proved to take too much time. We did discuss the issue, though, and for longer-term assignments, I'd be more strict about this.)

You can find links to student videos in the sidebars of tjese group blogs: Curiosity, Creativity, and Persistence.

Next steps. I'm tryng a multimodal approach to the research paper this semester. One of the required components is a "visual exploration," with a video as an option (either stupeflix or video-editing tool of student's choice).

 

 

Beyond the red pen

Notes for a presentation about using blogs to respond to student writing

My history as a blogger. I started blogging in 2004, with only the faintest idea what a blog was, in order to play around with  some technology new to me and hoping to be able to use my blog to collect up reflections about my teaching and notes on some things I'd been reading. (Here's a post from earlier this year, for example, where I play around a bit.) Before long I was starting to appreciate the power of blogs to connect to other people interested in teaching writing. As I started posting comments on other people's blogs and adding the blogs I liked to my blogroll, I started to get a few people reading my blog; I was astonished by how excited this made me and how much it motivated me to keep writing. I started contributing to the group blog Community College English, which I now run, and I started wondering if I could use blogs in my classes to give my students the same excitement, motivation, and connection.

My history as a teacher. When I started teaching (several decades ago), each semester my students would read four novels, write eight essays, and work their way through a 200-odd page grammar book that had them diagram and then write their own compound-complex sentences featuring various combinations of gerund, infinitive, and participial phrases. My job was to mark and count Major Usage Errors (we called them MUE's), which included fragments or run-on sentences, homonym errors, wrong verb forms, or pronoun or verb agreement problems. 3 MUE's meant an F on an essay. That was department policy, and essay sets were collected from us graduate assistants to make sure we adhered to this rule.

It bothers me that my students now have so many problems writing error-free paragraphs (let alone essays), but I have more important things to teach them. Out of habit, sometimes, my pen still moves to circle misspellings and check-mark sentence boundary issues, but I groan when my students say they have "corrected" a rough draft by "fixing the mistakes" I marked. I wonder if blogs could help to break both me and my students out of this misplaced emphasis on error.

How it works. 

• I set up a course blog, where I post the course syllabus, essay and reading assignments, links to online resources.
• I arrange to bring students into a computer lab on campus where I show them how to set up their own blogs. (This semester I'm using blogger; I've also used wordpress and edublogs.)
• Students give me their blogs' URL's, which I then post onto sidebar of course blog, separated by classes. Students are encouraged to browse and read others' essays.
• I give instructions for peer review (see here and here) and group students into pairs or trios (assigned after they have posted their drafts).
• I comment on rough drafts, moving back and forth between two open windows set up like this: Download Twowindows. 

Sample peer and instructor response. See Kristen and Lauren's blogs.

Other suggestions/options.

The commentpress template available in edublogs allows a reviewer to attach comments to specific paragraphs (for example, here). Students found this blogging software a little more difficult to use than blogger, and I found myself tempted, as you can see from the linked example, perhaps to "overmark" essays, esp. for style issues. (Maybe more appropriate for higher level courses?) 

In addition to asking students to post drafts, I've also used blogs for prewriting "trial run" of subjects, allowing me to give feedback on topic selection, an issue whose importance is significantly under-appreciated by many students, and for post-writing reflection on revision process (other reflective topics possible as well).

Potential advantages (especially) for portfolio students.

• deepening their sense of audience
• allowing time for more thoughtful responses to the work of their peers
• prompting them to consider criteria for evaluation as they measure their work against the work of others
•  fostering more frequent and more substantive revision
• helping to develop awareness of their own writing processes
• on a practical level, helping to keep work organized and accessible (and backed-up)

Difficulties and complaints (cited by approx. 20% of students in survey last week)

• student resistance to technology and, more significantly, problems with Internet access
• student reluctance to make work public
• student sense that this is more time-consuming

For additional resources, click here.

Composition class

Up until the age of eleven or twelve, I loved to draw and paint. I bought myself pads of drawing paper and artists' pencils, pastels and  cray-pas, tubes of oil paint, and I wandered around the house, outside and in, looking for a subject. I sketched flowers in the garden and my parents' faces as they sat reading after dinner. I examined my own face in the mirror, trying to separate myself into nonchalant model and  objective artist so that I could match in pencil the line of my jaw, the shape of my eyes. But some time around the beginning of adolescence, I gave up, realizing that, though I wasn't too bad at tracing outlines, I couldn't make my subjects pop into three dimensions. Shading and highlights eluded me. My drawing devolved into geometric doodles: boxes made by connecting the corners of two superimposed squares, stars of David made of isosceles triangles, the two-beat rhythmic swoop of treble clefs.

This spring, though, my youngest daughter asked to take a painting class at the local art museum, and I volunteered to take it as well to keep her company. The course title sold me: Composition: Painting Still Lives.

(I wondered how my situation and attitudes compare to those of a "reluctant" writer in one of my classes...)

What I learned as a student, with possibilities for translation to FYC teaching:

• I was surprised by how much I enjoyed collecting up the supplies (hog-bristle brushes both plump and narrow, tubes of paint with glorious names like alizarin crimson, Payne's gray, cadmium orange) and how it made me feel both excitement and a certain seriousness of purpose.
  
• Even when the teacher selects and positions the tropical fruit, adjusts the clamp-on light, shakes loose the draping of the background fabric, there is still such a range of possibilities for the individual student that the resulting paintings look surprisingly dissimilar. Despite this, I still feel the ache to pick my own objects.
  
• A framing device is useful to set limits, to focus one's attention. Move it around, bend and straighten yr arm, try out possibilities, but make a final decision not in yr head out of thin air but by sketching out some likely options.
  
• Consider what makes a composition desirable: how it's possible to have balance without a too-literal symmetry, what establishes the focal point of yr design.
  
• Before our first painting day, at home, we were instructed to lay down a coat of yellow ochre (apparently some artists choose other colors). There may be some technical reason for this, but our teacher emphasized its psychological value: to lessen the fear of marking a blank canvas.
  
• Class time is devoted primarily to making art, not talking about it. No one stands there paralyzed by painters' block.
  
• As we paint, the teacher roams around the room making suggestions, sometimes picking up a paint-less brush to demonstrate, sometimes calling us over to look at someone else's problem or solution.
  
• A painting is constructed by a process of layering ("fat over lean," it says in the books, but our teacher uses the more-PC "thick over thin"): first roughing out shapes, then patching in color, glazing shadows, and with thicker paint touching in highlights. Corrections and changes can be made at most any point along the way.
  
• Each class ends with critique, and everyone must talk, following a framework that sandwiches positive comments with suggestions.
  
• It is possible to abandon a piece without discouragement, to value what one has learned in the process without being entirely satisfied with the final product (cartoon pineapple, for example, or too-dark shadows that don't quite make sense).
  

Writing as product

We spend so much time talking in composition classes about writing as process, I often choose to start the semester with the notion that writing is valuable as artifact as well. Here are a few examples from the family archive:

This is, of course, a proto-document from early childhood (when my oldest daughter was maybe age three and a half): the letter to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, I've lost my ability to decode this fully, but I can make out a few words (people, very much) and, I think, most of the closing (by the way, say hello to the elves from me). Relevant topics: audience awareness, exigency, formal conventions dictated by genre, written vs spoken language (as in, usefulness of inter-word spacing)

Writing in the real world

The story of my mother's death is many stories. For my sister, perhaps, it is the final act of the decades-long fading away of my mother's emotional presence in our lives, the painful mystery of her lack of connection (was it the soul-wounding divorce of her parents when she was four, her alcoholism, her temperamental distaste for conflict, her growing inability to remember not only the train of a conversation but also the details of our histories?). For my brother the doctor (a phrase that recalls My Mother the Car), it is at least in part an object-lesson in the medical ethics of end-of-life issues: how to determine competence to make medical decisions when gravely ill patients suffer from some degree of dementia, how to manage communication between medical staff and family, how to weigh terminal care documents in emergency situations. I start here, now, from the safe distance of my own professional analysis, looking at and thinking about the written record of that week in April.

4 x 4 Writing Inspirations

In response to Joanna Young's invitation at Confident Writing:

lessons to be (re)learned

• One afternoon during freshman English class (high school variety) my teacher passed out a bagful of oranges. He told us we needed to learn to see things. We fingered the pebbled texture of the skin, examined the wrinkling around the stem end, pulled away the layers of peel and sticky white membrane, split apart a segment and poked with a pen tip at the packets of juice lined up orderly as rows of corn.
• I can still see the blackboard from Writing Workshop (sophomore year now): my teacher's spidery handwriting Show don't tell and below Specific details. The way I remember it, that just about summed up her advice. She left us alone to write most of that year, every once in a while calling someone to the round conference table and slipping an issue of the New Yorker from her pile, saying, "Here, read this," like a prescription tailored especially for that person.
• In the one-semester Form and Theory of Poetry class required of us fiction writers in graduate school, the teacher made us actually write poetry: heroic couplets, open couplets, blank verse, ballads, sonnets, terza rima, even ottava rima. I bought myself a rhyming dictionary and locked myself in my study for hours on end, discovering the generative power of form (as this assignment reminds me yet again).
• I did not particularly enjoy the fiction workshops in graduate school (a testosterone-laden atmosphere where writing a short story was often compared to playing a football game), but from the poet-friends who lounged around our livingroom after end-of-the-month potluck dinners and later crowded onto the picnic tables in the neighborhood bar's beer garden I learned the value of reader-pressure, the sense that there is a sympathetic audience waiting to read what I have written. (And for me this is one of the many appeals of blogging.)

body

• Walking around the block, I first notice the things I can’t see when I drive by, trying to pick the details that best convey the tone of each household: the silk flags changed for every holiday, the rake lines in gravel driveway, gazing globes nestled among hollyhocks and delphinium. I remember walking these routes when my oldest daughter was a baby, picking fistfuls of roadside wildflowers (blue toadflax, mullein, chicory, bittersweet nightshade), how later at home, when I was looking through the guidebooks, trying to name something made me look at it more closely. As I walk further, my attention strays. I follow my mind as it jumps from memory to memory, lists of things to do, then taking dictation as finally constructed sentences stream across my cranium like a tickertape of CNN news.
• Working at relatively mindless, repetitive tasks helps my mind to wander. Greek cooking seems especially good for this, rolling koulouraki or stuffed grape leaves for Easter dinner, but I’ve done other things as well: working in the dish room at college, scraping catsup-soaked remains into the garbage disposal, peeling dozens and dozens of hardboiled eggs all day, or outside pulling weeds in the garden, down on hands and knees, scratching soil loose with cultivator, then ripping weeds out by their root hairs.
• Once the beginning of an idea comes to mind, doodling helps to nourish and develop it. It’s important the paper be not too elegant (I’ve made the mistake many times over of buying too beautiful a journal, one that’s impossible to actually write in). Yellow narrow-lined legal pads are a good choice, or even better the backs of envelopes.  With the finest of black felt-tipped pens I scroll treble clefs and cubes and five-pointed stars until some words come.
• Avoiding the fast-approaching deadline of something I do not want to do (constructing a syllabus, say, or doing the income taxes) is another surefire way to get me working on a writing project.

mind

• I remember the family stories my mother told me: about my great-grandfather who immigrated from Sweden, a carpenter and poet and state legislator, who in the days before WWII brought home an entire German band for my great-grandmother to feed; my great-aunt, married in late middle-age to a man who fondled my mother's teenaged breasts and eventually committed suicide; my flapper-grandmother, who got pregnant, then married, at eighteen and divorced by twenty-two, who worked in an office to buy the fashionable clothes and costume jewelry her second husband said they couldn't afford, who delighted her grandchildren with her handmade angel and tomte Christmas ornaments, her spun-sugar Easter eggs filled with woodland scenes, her off-key voice husky from vodka singing Swedish songs that lilted something about hey hop min lilla socker top.
• I connect remembered bits from my past, like trying to find the repeating section in the complex geometric pattern of my grandmother's red-green-white kitchen floor. My great-aunt had a sterling silver brooch inset with a blue butterfly wing; when I was ten years old, in Charleston, West Virginia, I paid fifty cents for a butterfly pin shaped from tiny turquoise-colored fake pebbles, its eyes (do butterflies have eyes?) two pieces of even tinier red glass. I look for analogues, metaphors, leaps of associative thinking that circle back to the starting point. Though I think of myself as a skeptic, these serendipities comfort me with their demands for preservation.
• I try to imagine how my great-grandfather's best friend (the German hunchback, the rest of the family called him) came to paint what we now call the Naked Lady Picture, a ripe pink nude fresh from her bath, the initials on the towel hanging at her side monogrammed with the tangled initials of my great-grandmother's name. I try to imagine that scene in Washington, DC when my not-yet mother refused to stay in the bed of her married lover, determined instead to go to her library school seminar and thereby effectively ending the affair with the man who may have been the love of her life. I try to imagine if she would have been happier in a different life.
• And, as always, I read. Lately, thinking about the deepening mystery of her life, I have been reading mother-memoirs: Patricia Hampl's The Florist's Daughter, Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother, Meredith Hall's Without a Map.
  

spirit (or the deadly sins approach to fueling creativity)

• Envy stirred the other day as I ripped open the Amazon box to pull out the short story collection I'd pre-ordered four months ago, the third book of a woman from my high school class. I'll be checking weekly the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, waiting to see the reviews that will no doubt be glowing (I read one of the stories in a literary magazine; it was wonderful). In addition to this classmate, two of my roommates from graduate school have, by my count, published between them a whopping ten novels.
• The Faculty Without Offices come out of the woodwork for the beginning-of-the-semester meetings, announcing out of strange mouths their familiar-sounding names. Adjunct English, they explain to the full-time faculty at my community college who smile vaguely in their direction.  I refuse the title. In my latest experiment I’m trying to let anger fuel my writing, anger at the system and colleagues who face the same under-prepared students semester after semester but, when a new full-time position opens in the department, debate whether they’d prefer a Specialist in Emerging Literatures or a Renaissance Scholar.
• I tell myself that my greed  is under control, not for boatloads of money (just enough for books and dental work and, maybe, some new kitchen cabinets) but rather for a secure job that gives me time and energy to write.
• The fear is not of death, exactly, but rather oblivion, the old "Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain" syndrome. In her daily obituary reading, my mother, at 78, marvels at how long people are living these days; at 51, I see the teenagers killed in car accidents and the 4o-year-olds whose families request donations to Hospice in lieu of flowers. Two days ago my mother missed guessing the year of her marriage by a decade; yesterday she asked if the neighbor who'd been the best woman-friend of her adulthood was still alive (she isn't). It's time to write.

Writing teacher writing

In the past few months, as I've been trying to figure out how to carve out more time for my own writing,  relevant articles and passages have been dropping from the sky. First someone slipped into my mailbox a NISOD Innovation Abstracts sheet, Stephen A. Catrello's "Practicing What You Teach". He recounts, when he was an adjunct, bringing in samples from his technical editing "real job," both to show his students real-world writing and to let them see him as a fellow writer. Later, when he landed his full-time gig, he wrote the narrative essay assignment along with his students, emphasizing the value of their seeing his process and his struggles (and successes presumably).

I often have thought about doing assignments along with my students, but hadn't  found the time until this semester (although I do generally talk about how I'd approach the assignment and toss out some of my conceptual-art-essays).

Warning: digression ahead. Which makes me think about the essay-of-the-mind (to echo Wallace Stevens' "On Modern Poetry"). I'm not sure whether it's an occupational hazard or my natural habits of procrastination (probably both), but I find myself with a sizable collection of ghost-essays, germs of ideas floating around in my head or at most scribbled onto some back-of-an-envelope to-write list , but not yet fleshed out into actual words. It's a dangerous practice, I'm afraid, for several reasons.

• It's too easy for the concepts in my mind to seem clever, insightful, poignant so that it's with stomach-churning disappointment that I see them lying there lifeless when finally captured on paper. Hypothesis: the longer the ghost-essays wander around my head before venturing out to test the air the more painful the disillusionment. Learning to tolerate this pain is (one) key to overcoming writers' block, which is a serious problem for so many of my students. The idea, of course, is to convince them that Revision will come riding to the rescue on that cliched White Horse.
• The other important thing, for me to remember and for students to understand, is that in the process of putting down these ideas on paper brings up more ideas. As the mathematicians say, this is a nontrivial statement.

Looking back, or ahead: opening day assignment

The 13th week of class is the time to harangue now-familiar students to get cracking on those research-paper rough drafts, most definitely not the time for recapping the semester's beginning assignment. And yet, as always, I find myself about this time looking ahead (my own procrastination strategy), looking forward to the fresh start that January will bring with its rosters of strangers' names.

Classmate snapshot (original version). Pick a representative moment in yr life, a tiny slice no more than a minute or two that captures some aspect of yr life or personality that you'd like to share. Maybe you were driving through Dunkin Donuts this morning for yr daily French vanilla iced coffee, singing along to whoever-it-is on yr car stereo, as you drove up to the window momentarily embarrassed at the mound of crumpled McDonald's bags on the floor of yr car. Maybe you were sitting on yr new overstuffed couch at 2 am,  watching Casablanca for the thirty-eighth time, with a tub of pistachio ice cream on yr lap. Maybe you were standing at the kitchen stove trying to cook, with yr two-year-old clinging to yr knees and yr preschoolers tearing lettuce at the kitchen table. (Contrary to my own obsessions, food need not be involved.) Maybe you were at work. What were you doing? Who else was there? What do yr surroundings look like? Or maybe you're involved in one of yr many hobbies. Imagine this moment as a snapshot (or a very short clip of film).

Now pair up with another student. Introduce yourselves. Each of you must interview the other, asking about his/her snapshot moment. If the snapshot is not clear in yr mind, ask questions to sharpen the picture. Take notes. Remember the tools of the fiction writer: setting, character, action, dialogue (a line or two can "snap" a character into life). For homework, write one paragraph that gives the reader this snapshot of yr classmate in words. (If you get home and find that yr paragraph is thin and skimpy, make something up.)

Goals.

• to get students talking to each other
• to get an initial portrait gallery of the class (for semesters when I'm using a CMS or blogs, I ask students to post these paragraphs--so useful for orientation to technology involved as well)
• to obtain initial writing sample for informal assessment of writing "levels"
• to talk about specific details (evaluating which details are "best," i.e., most revealing) , showing not telling, revision, and all that beginning-of-semester jazz (to be reprised throughout)

Not again to the lake?!! (or, Selecting essays for FYC)

In trying to decide which essays to use in my comp classes this semester, paging through the stacks of texts sent out by publishers, I was struck by an amazing coincidence: Why is it that, of all the narrative essays in the English-speaking world, George Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" and E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" show up over and over and over again? (Judy Brady's "I Need a Wife" seems to me somewhat over-represented as well as the proto-definition essay...) I pulled out White's essay for a closer look. Now, I know I'm supposed to revere him as a stylist (and I am fond of Charlotte's Web and Elements of Style), but that particular essay, for me, reeks of musty Reader's Digest condensed books and damp mass market mysteries, conjures the feel of scratchy blankets and two too-many days without a hot shower. So, rather than actually buckling down and committing to a half-dozen essays or so I'd use in my classes, I instead started one of my meta-musings about the process. I've written before about why to use reading of external texts in FYC; now I've been thinking more specifically about how I do (or should) choose the particular pieces I assign my students.

As I started in, thinking about why and why not for particular essays, I paired in my mind White's "Once More to the Lake" with another essay I'd assigned for a few semesters, then discarded, Michael Pollan's essay "Why Mow? The Case against Lawns."  Why Pollan, and this essay in particular? Well, I own all four of his books (though I haven't had time to read The Omnivore's Dilemma yet); I admire his style; I'm interested in his subjects. Grass seemed to me initially a universal topic, and I'm partial to essays that invite the reader to take a new look at something he may have taken for granted. Though I've pushed a lawn mower  only a few yards in my life (my parents expected me, as a girl, to do well in math and science, but lawn mowing and garbage disposing were not among my childhood chores), the subject evoked memories: running and scuffing my bare feet through newly cut grass as my father finished up his twilight mowing; the college bio-sci librarian in town who planted his lawn over to wildflowers, forcing his neighbors to examine the prejudices of their own lawn-aesthetic (nice in theory but not next to my shorn grass); my husband's childhood neighborhood, where grass measuring over 2.7 inches tall resulted in grumbling over the hedges and, in short order, the imposition of  fines for civic irresponsibility. Beyond the personal resonances, I had things to say about the essay from a writing teacher perspective (notice his tactic with the lead, his seamless integration of sources, how the structure of his argument is built from blocks of description and narration and comparison/contrast). The thing that got me though, looking out at the faces of my actual students, many of them lower income, first generation American, first generation college students, was wondering how many of them had lawns or the experience of mowing lawns. I'm not sure how relevant that is or should be in choosing to discuss the essay (surely unfamiliarity alone is not sufficient grounds for excluding an essay from consideration), but the consciousness of class that the essay raised was uncomfortable for me. I'm still not quite sure what to do with those feelings, but for now I haven't been using that essay.

A word is worth 1000 pictures??

In response to John Walter's response on Machina Memorialis, I've been exploring a little more my own ambivalences about the use of images in FYC. (It's relevant, I suppose, that although several of the blogs I regularly read beautifully use photographs--bgblogging and writing as jo(e) come to mind--this blog of mine is resolutely image-free.) I'll stick, first, fairly close to his points, trying on some contrary positions just for fun, then wander further afield...

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I'm interested in John's point that images were historically tied to words in meaning-making and that "composition sans image is deeply roots in and tied to print culture [...] and this move to banish the image from serious texts in fairly new." I'm interested as well in the neat sort of turn by which digital media have brought the image back into play (I hope I'm not mis-stating his point...)  But I don't quite understand how images played such a role pre-Gutenberg, when virtually all of the poetry-drama-fiction- philosophy-history -whatever texts I've read and that we ask high school and college students to read are indeed exclusively word-based. Were images stripped away from these texts at some point in the modern typesetting process? These early texts were distributed and preserved via recitation (aural memory) and manuscript. Were the images in illustrated manuscripts produced by the authors of the texts or the  manuscript-copiers, or doesn't that matter?  What do we know about the actual composition of these early works? To be flippant, is there evidence that Plato sketched out a floorplan to think his way through to Allegory of the Cave? (To anticipate my next point, I'm taking "image" here in the above to mean graphic image, that is, picture, since I don't see how aural/manuscript/print/digital culture issue affects either mental or verbal images.)

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I'm bothered by the commingling of mental, verbal, and graphic images. They seem qualitatively different to me in the processes of thinking and writing and reading. I am reminded of a post I wrote a few years ago on Words and thoughts, and I'll repeat the quote  from Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct:

In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts....People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not "in" the world but are imposed by one's culture...But it is wrong, all wrong....People can be forgiven for overrating language. Words make noise, or sit on a page, for all to hear and see. Thoughts are trapped inside the head of the thinker. To know what someone else is thinking, we have to use--what else, words!

That is, it seems to me that thought can take place pre-verbally, in the form of mental images, or even more amorphously, something like sensations, hints, intimations. My sense of my own thoughts is not I am producing and listening to a constantly streaming inner monologue, but that "things" flicker past without my having the chance or wanting to take the time to verbalize them. But to capture these images (for my own examination or to communicate them to others) I have to attach words to them (or make them manifest in some other medium, oil paint, say).  This is a necessary (I think) part of the critical thinking process and largely what we mean by the process of composition, to grab hold of these mental images and embody them in words.

Verbal images, associated with the poetic, seem to me something like what I'd call concrete details (words that refer to and create sensory images) and figurative language. The split that John identifies between poetic and rational discourses is tragic, in my view, resulting in the depersonalized, hyper-abstract, jargon-ridden forms of academic discourse that make my skin crawl. There are people I guess who aspire to write this way, but I'm not one of them (hence no Ph.D for me) and I don't take it as my mission in FYC to create such writers. I concede that for certain technical writing aimed at a specialized audience the poetic may be appropriately "purged" from the rational; for my money, though, in general terms, for a general audience  "good writing" requires these verbal images, not merely as stylistic flourishes but for clarity's sake as well.

So we have mental images integral really to the process of thought and verbal images a requirement for effective writing. For me, graphic images are a different sort of creature. Helpful in some contexts (maps of troop movements in Civil War battles--that is, for showing spatial relationships; bar graphs, pie charts, and other mathematico-statistical representations--that is, for summarizing data and depicting quantitative and qualitative relationships; photographs of people, places, things--that is, for presenting a version of apparently unmediated reality and thus short-cutting the need for physical description) but--here's the important thing--these graphic images are basically optional conveniences. Maybe. (I'm talking here about the use of graphic images within a text; as an aid to invention they seem potentially more useful. A side note: I am not a fan of the graphic novel, though perhaps I should give them more of a chance...)

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