“Seeing the Text,” by Stephen Bernhardt

Bernhardt, Stephen. “Seeing the Text.” CCC 37.1 (Feb. 1986): 66-78.
In “Seeing the Text,” Stephen A. Bernhardt argues that presenting ideas visually enhances writing and improves the skills of the writer: “Writing, especially when visually informative, encourages the writer to be exact about grouping related ideas, delineating beginnings and endings, and using cues to signal to the reader a graphic representation of cognitive organization. (67)
This view of visual information as a compliment to textual information provides the theoretical basis for seeing the production of multimedia texts as an extension of the writing process. Organizational strategies are as important to visual texts as they are to traditional print-based texts. Bernhardt stresses that visual texts require “rhetorical organization” and that visual analysis is as important in understanding a text as is textual analysis. The visual presentation of text on a page, or on a screen, is rhetorically important to both readers and writers of the text. This view of visual information as a compliment to textual information provides the theoretical basis for seeing the production of multimedia texts as an extension of the writing process.