Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design

Our textbook authors, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, ask on page 30: “…is the move from the verbal to the visual a loss or a gain?”

Lost in its simplicity, I think, is that the verbal is visual, at least once it is textualized, alphabetically symbolized.

Consider the previous sentence. In order to both create and clarify meaning, to motivate my idea, I’ve positioned the statement, surrounded by white space, designating its importance to me; whether the reader chooses to share that importance remains to be seen. I have capitalized the first letter. This is where the sentence begins; meaning starts here; this is a new thought. The bold-face type augments the meaning, calls attention to the central point redundant in this argument. Italicization surrounds a word choice that may be unfamiliar or suspect, laced with a different nuance of meaning. In my original copy, created in Word for Mac, there is a red line under this word, telling me that it is not in the dictionary, perhaps misspelled. Is this a word I have made up? I could have surrounded the word with quotation marks; I’ve elected to italicize the font. To what motivation? Also, surrounded by commas, appears a qualifier, “I think.” You might agree. You might not. This clause could be omitted from the sentence/symbol and the meaning may not change, but the motivation does.

I had been thinking about the verbal versus the visual in the context of a recent experience I had with an audio book. I had always meant to try “reading” in this format, perhaps on a long drive. Being in school, I thought this might be my chance to engage in the luxury of a non-academic read, to indulge myself in literature during a time in which I was actually physically unable to bury my nose in assigned reading. So on a whim, I logged into iTunes and downloaded Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” It is pointless. I cannot read this book without seeing it. I must be able to go back, to look at a sentence again and again, perhaps a whole paragraph, to see the page and the structure. I might need to go back several chapters and revisit a phrase or a character’s description. So how can text not be visual?

This observation also compels me to consider, as we embrace the multimodality of expressing meaning, when we might be called upon to consider the auditory elements of the alternate “texts” we are charged with producing. To what motivation might we apply use of sound, music, different pitches of voice, accents, dialects or ethnicities? What impact on meaning might these variances produce?