ABSTRACT
Writing teachers often link writing and vision. We ask students their views on an issue, we ask them to look at each other’s papers, we inquire if they see what we mean, and we call for revisions. Yet often their writing is not what we or they envision. I wonder if developing writers review their work in ways we know to be beneficial because they have never truly viewed it in the first place. By view, I mean using one of the most basic ways of knowing-the visual-as part of their writing processes. Visual knowledge, through mental imagery and visual thinking, has long been used in other disciplines. Yet it is often culturally devalued and frequently opposed to the verbal-a hierarchy that needs to be dismantled much as Derrida (1974) did with speech and writing when he showed that writing was not inferior to speech, but complicit with it. The same is true of the verbal and visual.
