The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Tag: sk12

Eye Drew A Diagram!

Student Posts

Introductory side note: I want to start this off by saying drawing this eye brought me right back to eighth grade. There was a phase in my life (yes I was one of those girls) where all I would do during class was sketch eyes. Slowly the subject matter changed to clothing…anyway, it felt familiar and silly and I wanted to share that.

On a more serious note, I thought an eye would encapsulate the most important thing I learned in this English class: I am a visual thinker and learner. I always knew I was good at memorizing visuals, but when we talked about the benefits of thinking visually as a part of the writing process, I wasn’t just skeptical, I brushed it right off thinking I knew that style of learning wasn’t for me. I was wrong. Drawing out my literacy narrative was immensely helpful in refocusing the story on what was important in my journey as a reader and writer. I was unable to do that in my alphabetic version when I attempted to edit the paper before drawing the comic. I am not sure if others had the same eye-opening experience as me, but I hope they did because that “ah hah!” feeling of understanding my brain a little better was so satisfying everyone should get to feel that. In my sketch, I labelled the different parts of the eye pertaining to which learning outcome they agreed with the most. The most important part was the diagram itself being an eye because of the sheer impact that visual images, thinking, learning, and tools have had on my experience in this class.

Exploring the Open Ocean

Student Posts
Image Credit:
http://www.nortonyachts.com/sailboat-anatomy/

Writing to me is a vast sea waiting to be explored, and the knowledge and skills I gained from the First-Year Writing course hold together like a sailboat, carrying me over the future adventures in writing. In this sketch, I break down a sailboat into five parts, each of them represents one learning outcome I achieved.

  • Jib Sail: Writing as a Process

   Over the semester, we keep returning to our previous writings to re-edit them into better texts. The Literacy Narrative assignment, in particular, shows me how writing is an ongoing process that requires constant reflection and revision to create good works. I paired this particular learning outcome with the jib sail because when sailing, jib sail needs to be constantly adjusted according to varying wind direction so that the boat can sail smoothly, which is similar to the continual adjusting in writing.

  • Hull: Rhetorical Composition

   The hull is the main body of a boat, holding all separate parts together. Similarly, throughout this semester we were able to explore several aspects of rhetorical composition. I was inspired to try out various mediums through assignments like creating comics & Halfa Kucha presentation. I also explored various genres such as composing a visual poem in the Human Document Sunday Sketch and writing an analytical essay.

  • Daggerboard: Digital Citizenship

   The whole course is structured around the idea of us being in an electronic environment, from setting up our own websites to posting updates online. Aside from posting articles, I felt the need to design my website to make it more attractive. I also learned to include engaging introductions in my writings and appropriately give credits to sources I used. All of these are big parts of digital citizenship and essential tools I can use in future writing, just like the daggerboard being the core that balances the entire boat.

  • Rudder: Critical thinking

   Just as the rudder steers the boat, critical thinking skills guided me through all projects of the course. Class discussions, peers’ works, and assigned readings all helped me grow as a critical thinker. 

  • Main Sail: Visual Thinking

   The development of visual thinking skills is undoubtedly the main focus of the course. Trying for the first time to turn an alphabetic text into a comic, I was surprised by how visual images can effectively inspire me to revise my original essay. Besides, I was able to analyze visual elements in the comics we read and gain insights on the big picture from minor visual cues. 

Lastly, after completing the course, I found myself a more observant and innovative writer. We were constantly asked to observe things happening around and incorporate them into our works, sometimes giving deeper meanings to everyday objects and events. Therefore, I start to pay more attention to every little aspect of my life and hope to find inspirations in an innovative way. 

Unpacking ENG 181:

Student Posts

For my final Sunday Sketch I decided to pay homage to one of our earlier sunday sketches; “What’s In Your Bag?” Where I dissected my school bag and gave a discription of each item. I thought of this sketch when creating this assignment because this English class was very much like a bag containing various elements and items. The two biggest components of the bag were the books we read along with the website we created. This illustration is a reflection of how our class time mainly focused on these two aspects. And the materials we covered that contributed to helping us achieve the outcomes of the course. I also included the outside texts that we used to analyze the comics. I identified these the “Accessories” of the pack because we didn’t necessarily need them but they became very useful throughout the semester. All of the items in the bag were essential to my comprehension and understanding of the Learning Outcomes.

A Model of the Brain

Student Posts

For this week’s final Sunday Sketch Assignment I chose to depict a diagram of a brain and the break down of components that I have obtained over these past few months. I represented each of the learning outcomes and my own personal growth to demonstrate all of what I have been able to learn. I have development as a writer in several ways through all of the assignments we’ve done and picked up new techniques for reading and writing that will help me for a long time to come. The work that I have completed this semester fits into all of these learning outcomes because they are truly what I have been able to gain from this experience and this diagram of the brain represents the assimilation of each of them to my own mind as well.

A Recipe for…Disaster?

Student Posts
A diagram drawn by Dean

Having “interesting introduction” as the first layer of my sandwich is putting a whole lot of pressure on this first sentence. Oh well. Sometimes you’ve got to cook not by the book.

I made this diagram based off the National Archives Cocktail Construction Chart, and while I obviously don’t follow this chart to write all my posts, and as my introduction illustrates, I often don’t abide to all of its aspects, I thought this was a pithy way to present my general format. I guess the movie magic is broken now; maybe I’ll switch it up a bit and try something a bit unexpected and–

My Heroic Journey Through ENG 181

Student Posts

For the Assemblies assignment, I started by brainstorming potential ideas for what metaphor could represent my growth in English class this semester. I thought about how the point of the class was not only to analyze and write about comics but also to acquire techniques to use in our writing in the future. I reflected on how we began the course with some alphabetic texts which helped us prepare to read comics in a familiar medium. Then we launched into reading and analyzing comics, which was unfamiliar to me. Despite the course’s focus on comics, one of the main takeaways was to learn how to apply the strategies that cartoonists use in our other writing. For me, I learned through converting my Literacy Narrative first from alphabetic text to a comic, and then back to an alphabetic text, that I can better streamline my narrative if I sketch out a storyboard for it since it forces me to focus not on the details, but on the big picture. I plan on applying this technique in the future when I write essays, in order to make my writing as concise and clear as possible.

Sketch 12: Assemblies

Sketches

Due: 12/8

Tag: sk12

For some unknown reason, the National Archives includes a document entitled Cocktail Construction Chart, which was created by the US Forest Service in 1974, showing recipes for a group of cocktails represented in the style of an architectural diagram.

For this week’s sketch, think about the work you’ve completed in this class and your own learning and thinking processes — then break all that down into component parts, represented in some sort of an architectural diagram like this one. I’m less interested in the quality of the drawing itself and more in your analytical ability to break down something complicated into a series of steps and to represent that as if in such a diagram.

Creating this diagram should be a key step towards completing your portfolio reflection letter (and I will encourage you to use the diagram as a key image in that letter). If you think about what you have learned this semester about yourself as a writer and reader, how can you represent that understanding as a single diagram, and how do the various pieces of writing you have done fit into that diagram to construct your vision?

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