The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

When choosing the topic for my visual note taking assignment I considered what classes have the most complicated material for me to understand. I chose my Latin 370 class because we are reading Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations and sometimes I struggle to grasp all the arguments he is making and all the rhetorical techniques he is utilizing. By including all the historical, political and social context on one page, I was better able to understand the tactics Cicero was using in his speech to the Roman Senate. Since I have an exam coming up this week on this topic, I found this exercise to be a great way to review and remember the greater context of the speech to help me better analyze and translate the individual portions later. Before today I had never studied for latin in a visual medium and I was surprised by how relieving if felt to get everything down on one page that had been floating around in my head. It felt as though I no longer had to worry about remember every thought I had had because now I had them written down and depicted so I would always have a reference to look to.

You can find the description of this assignment here.

For this visual note taking assignment, I chose to remake my physics notes. This is because physics is my favorite STEM class and it is my hardest. I have never taken a physics class before and although we are going at a quick pace, the material is extremely interesting. Because we are moving at such a fast pace, my notes tend to be messy; I thought that visualizing my notes would be helpful.

During the process, I learned. a lot about how I process information. Personally, the drawing aspect did not help me that much, but the organizational components were extremely helpful. When I normally make my notes, the important parts of the lesson are the same size as the non important parts, so it is hard to visualize what is important and what is not. Here, it is very simple to know what the lesson revolves around because of how central the themes are. I know that I can’t create these types of notes in the moment, but I might go over the important notes and rewrite after the lesson.

Here is the link to the rubric for the assignment: CLICK HERE!

Astronomy requires a lot of visual thinking and necessary observations in order to understand the material throughout the course. Creating visual notes for this class was much more helpful than textual notes could have ever been. While drawing these images and formulating my notes, the concepts of the astronomical ideas I am currently learning were much more understandable. I could visualize the theories and laws more clearly and comprehend the meaning of these new ideas with the pictorial applications in my notes.

While drawing these images I realized just how much of a visual learner I am. I do not believe I could have understood the this chapter of my astronomy class if I had not been able to draw out these images and recognize the true applications of these ideas. Not to mention, I thoroughly enjoyed creating these notes. Usually the notes I take in class are not very intricate and not as understandable as I would like for them to be. Creating my visual notes helped me to go over the information that I’ve learned while having fun making art through these foreign ideas. I’m thankful for the prompt that led me to this new way of understanding my course materials which can be found here.

For this week’s Sunday Sketch assignment, I recreated my written notes for an Art History lecture as visual notes.

I started out writing the topic “Ancient Egypt” in the center of the page because all the artworks we learned in class were created during this period. I always struggle with memorizing the chronological order of art periods, so this time, I drew a timeline that laid out major art periods during the Egyptian era so it was easier for me to memorize. Also, I highlighted the “New Kingdom” period in the timeline to indicate the focus of this note.

On top of that, visual notes also made comparisons more straightforward. For example, I couldn’t understand the similarities between the Temple of Hatshepsut and Temple of Mentuhotep II when I looked at my original notes. However, drawing the two temples right next to each other gave me a clearer insight into their similarities, and the same goes for the comparison between Punt and Egyptian culture in the upper right corner of the note.

I personally think that images do a better job of connecting things than texts do. When I was creating my visual notes for The Last Judgement from Book of the Dead, I surprisingly found that images and arrows displayed the separate steps of entering the afterlife in a much more logical way than a bunch of texts could ever achieve. Thus, I no longer have a hard time recalling the exact words from my notes but instead describing the artwork using my own words with the visual image in my mind.