ALLYN & BACON/LONGMANwww.ablongman.com

BEYOND WORDS: READING ANDWRITING IN A VISUAL AGE© 2006

John RuszkiewiczDaniel AndersonChristy Friend

ISBN 0-321-27601-9

S A M P L E C H A P T E RThe pages of this Sample Chapter may have slight variations in final published form.

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17

What’s in This Chapter?

Media clutter has grown to the point that an honest message intelli-gently conveyed might not get noticed. While no one can blame you forplaying it cool in the face of media overload, you might miss much thatreally matters if you don’t actively seek out and respond to what’s spe-cial, beautiful, sacred, awesome, or weighty in the world.

This chapter provides questions for reading and exploring texts to makeyou a more perceptive and active reader. We discuss each questionbriefly and then follow up with exam-ples and exercises that draw from arange of media. Throughout this book,we define text very broadly to includeanything deliberately fashioned by hu-man beings to convey an idea, a mes-sage, or even a feeling. By our defini-tion, then, a forest isn’t a text, but aphotograph of one could be. A city initself might be too vast and random tobe a coherent text, but it containsmany messages worth reading andwriting about. Movies, paintings,posters, murals, songs, symphonies,sculptures, advertisements, bumperstickers, T-shirts, video games, and e-mail messages are all texts. Most im-portant for our purposes, words andimages are texts that carry messagesand make meaning. We read and ex-plore these texts by looking at themclosely, and by seeing how they con-nect to and illuminate other texts.

16 I N T R O D U C T I O N

IntroductionIntroduction

Just moving from a classroom to your dorm or apartment, you encounterso many appeals and messages that you may notice none of them—notthe posters on the classroom walls, EXIT signs above doors, headlines in

the campus paper, logos on T-shirts, shouts from activists on the mall, ban-ners strung over the street, traffic signs all down your route, music in yourears, billboards for Scion, Red Bull, Aveda, and on and on.

To gain attention, a message practically has to jump out at you, a little likethe youth in a painting by Pere Borrell del Caso featured a few years ago inan exhibit at the National Gallery of Art called “Deceptions and Illusions:Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting." The French term trompe-l’œil,which means “fools the eye," refers to an enduring style of painting in whichartists create images so true-to-life that they blur the line between reality andillusion.

Borrell’s painting certainly makes you take notice. But why, exactly? For onething, we expect subjects to stay inside their frames, and this wide-eyed boyis climbing into our world, and he seems as astounded by the situation as weare. But wait a minute. Is that frame around the painting or a part of it? Andwhere is the youngster coming from—and heading to? Is he a hooligan up tono good or a would-be cherub escaping yet another fresco? Some questionsmay be answered by knowing that Borrell named this 1874 painting EscapingCriticism. Yet that title seems too calculated for this likable piece, whichprobably wins your attention by cleverly thumbing its nose at conventionsand provoking all sorts of questions.

Images like Escaping Criticism call out for interpretation, but countless otherimages and texts invite us to respond to what’s special, beautiful, sacred,awesome, or weighty in the world. Don’t wait until messages start jumpingout of their frames to grab your attention. Take initiative as a reader, writer,and maker of texts.

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What do you see?If someone handed you aslide rule today to figure outyour taxes or do the calcu-lations for a math test, youmight feel confused and dis-oriented. What is this con-traption, with its tiny num-bers and parallel scales? What’s it for? How does it operate? The moving rulerand clear plastic slides might tempt you to experiment with it, but you’d needplenty of assistance before you’d know how to read this unfamiliar text,which was common in American high schools prior to the invention of thepocket calculator.

A feeling of disorientation (or wonder) is actually a good place to begin yourencounter with any new text—verbal, visual, aural, tactile. An intriguing textshould attract your attention and provoke questions.

■ What do you focus on in the work? Your reading begins with a spark ofinterest. Can you identify what caused it—what the focal point of thework might be?

■ What kind of work is it? When we meet a dog, most of us immediately tryto identify its breed or mix in order to appreciate its looks, temperament,and characteristics. We do the same with texts we encounter, substitutinggenre for breed. Genres are expressed through conventions—the featuresand structures that make them what they are.

■ How does this work differ from others like it? Works routinely bend con-ventions and cross boundaries. That’s what makes many contemporarytexts so intriguing and provoking. They have been reinvented by the infu-sion of electronic technologies.

■ What is the work’s medium? Different media convey different kinds of in-formation and make different kinds of demands.

F I N D F O C A L P O I N T S Writers, artists, designers, architects, and evenmusicians know how important it is to focus their work. To be a good reader,you need to notice how they do it. If you’ve ever written a paper with a thesisstatement or a paragraph with a topic sentence, you are familiar with one sim-ple device for focusing with words: a sentence or two that clearly announcewhat the writer intends to discuss.

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The world is full of texts that challenge you to read them carefully—great books, movies, and TV productions, splendid pieces of music,thought-provoking buildings, and important political documents, to

name but a few. But there are texts, too, whose creators would probably pre-fer that you not look too closely: They may have things to conceal in theirmessage or their craft. They depend on your not showing enough interest tosearch them for meaning. Just a few questions can open these texts up.

Reading Texts

18 R E A D I N G T E X T S

Reading Texts. A Tutorial

www.ablongman.com/beyondwords01

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20 R E A D I N G T E X T S

their wardrobes from older ones. Very old movies, for instance, sometimes looklike stage plays because that’s how early filmmakers imagined stories should betold visually. Pioneer screenwriters also drew upon novels and plays for theirscripts, again using well-established conventions to help invent new ones.Today, creators of video games sometimes take their inspiration from movies—and, amazingly, vice versa. Indeed, the electronic revolution of the past fewdecades has spawned many fresh ways of sharing words and images, some ofwhich have quickly evolved conventions of their own. E-mail, for example,might be categorized as a subgenre of the letter, and carries forward conven-tions like senders and recipients, but adds new ones like emoticons.

So in encountering a text, old or new, you want to ask questions about whatthe thing is. You may have to do some research to find out. In a museum,you’ll find signs and guidebooks to help you appreciate artifacts you may notrecognize. Libraries are full of reference tools that can introduce you to every-thing from epic poems to classic movies. But for many texts and objects, youmay have to define the genre on the fly, thinking critically about their shape,asking yourself what they resemble and how they work.

But there are dozens or other techniques for focusing attention. On a printedpage, a big headline, an underscored heading, boldfaced or italic type, or afour-color photo might entice your eye. In a photograph, an artist might uselight and shadow to seduce your gaze, whereas a painter might align objectsto point subtly to a focal point, moving you almost subconsciously in a spe-cific direction. On a Web page, you might first encounter a striking graphic ora tempting menu of options to engage your attention.

So you can easily begin your encounters with texts by noting where you lookfirst and then asking why. But be prepared, too, to be puzzled or deliberatelythrown off balance. Many texts will resist your efforts to understand them ata glance, to pluck out the heart of their mysteries.

I D E N T I F Y T H E G E N R E After you’ve first encountered a text, you’lllikely ask—consciously or not—what it resembles or into what genres it fits. Agenre is simply a category we use to name and identify a text with consistentand familiar features. Without much effort, you could enumerate the featuresof the letter; you could also explain the differences between subgenres such asthe business letter and the personal letter. And you could likely identify many

other types of letters, each with distinctive features or mis-sions: job application letters, letters to the editor, “DearJohn” letters, and so on.

Genres can seem relatively stable, but their boundaries arerarely fixed. For instance, you likely know what a novel is:Let’s say it’s a prose tale told at some length involvingcharacters whose lives engage you. When you pick up anovel and consider reading it, you’ll likely study the dustjacket, perhaps looking for the signals that will slot it intoa favored category or subgenre—mystery, romance, histor-ical fiction, cyberpunk novel. But some novels will resistcategorization or tell their stories in unanticipated ways ormedia.

E X A M I N E C O N V E N T I O N S Once you’ve identifiedthe genre or subgenre of a text simply, you then know howto read some of its features: In a romance novel, you’ll ex-pect to find a tale of passionate lovers set in exotic locales.And because you have these generic expectations, you canalso appreciate when a writer or artist defies or parodiesconventions.

The fun starts when texts start bending conventions andforming new ones. Not infrequently, new genres borrow

Still from an early silent film

Cover art for a series romance novel

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C O N S I D E R T H E M E D I U M In fact, like early filmmakers, you’ll likelytransfer what you already know about existing genres to any new medium youencounter. That multifunction cell phone is, after all, just a very smart commu-nication device that can remember your schedule, take photos, download instantmessages and e-mail, and keep tabs on stock prices. But somewhere in a mixlike this, something may change and suddenly you’re handling ideas in a novelway. What had been a cell phone evolves into an environment for new genres oftexts. That’s certainly what happened to the computer, which started out as avery smart calculator. Now silicon brains power all sorts of “new media."

As a result, you’re probably more aware of media now than ever before, andits important not to take these media for granted, thinking, for instance, thatreading words on a page is the same experience as reading words on a screen.Media deliver messages to us in different ways at different speeds, and weprocess and experience those messages differently.

For example, you’ve probably encountered Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet onthe page, on stage, and on film. What changes? Almost everything. Eachmedium makes its own demands on your imagination and your senses. Readthe play, and you create most of the work in your head. Watch it from a front-row theater seat, and you might duck when the swords start clashing. See it onDVD, and Leonardo DiCaprio becomes the default Romeo in your mind.

Or consider how differently you experience a news event if you learn of it viaa magazine, a newspaper, a nightly news program, a twenty-four-hour newschannel, or a Web site or blog. The medium shapes the message, or at least agood part of it.

E X A M P L E S Mention the word poem, and you have some idea what to ex-pect of this genre: words artfully chosen and arranged to convey some pow-erful idea or feeling. You may love poetry or run away from the stuff. Butwhen you encounter a poem, it might help to know something about themany subgenres into which it might fall: There are epics, lyrics, odes, acros-tics, and haiku, to name just a very few. One type you probably recognize isthe sonnet—by tradition, a love poem in fourteen lines with a specific patternof rhyme. With a little research, you could discover many things about thesonnet subgenre that add to your appreciation of such poems: for instance,that they often use fairly conventional imagery (like ruby lips and cherrycheeks) and that they often come in sequences that tell the story of a man’spursuit of an ideal woman. Recognizing these conventions helps when youmeet a famous work such as Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130," (1609), a poem ad-dressed to a mysterious “dark lady," who may or may not have played a rolein the poet’s life.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,But no such roses see I in her cheeks;And in some perfumes is there more delightThan in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I knowThat music hath a far more pleasing sound.I grant I never saw a goddess go;My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rareAs any she belied with false compare.

Many later poets have also employed the sonnet form, but they have movedit in new directions. Their poems are not always about romantic love, don’talways run for just fourteen lines, or may not rhyme conventionally. But theydo claim the brevity, concentration, and intricacy of the original genre. Here,in the third poem of a sequence called “Clearances,” is Nobel laureate SeamusHeaney (b. 1939) using the sonnet form to memorialize his mother. The workappears in the collection The Haw Lantern (1987).

When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head,Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

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C O N S I D E R

1. Take a moment to study Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance. Itstitle probably tells you what to notice first in the painting, the woman’sdelicate fingers holding a balance in the very center of the work. Butwhat else in the painting moves you to look there? What devices doesthe artist employ to direct your attention to that spot? Consider ele-ments such as light, shadow, gestures, and other objects in the painting.

2. The grille is what you probably notice first on this publicity shot for the2005 Chrysler 300C. What elements in the photograph lead youto focus on the grille, the largest design element on most cars and trucks? What mes-sage or messages might the manufacturer be sending potential buyers through this im-age? Could you transform the message into words? Give it a try.

3. Make a list of the different kinds of writing you do in a single day. Don’t include academictypes of writing only. List all your uses of words, whether on paper or screen. Any sur-prises in your list?

4. Find a page of TV listings, and create a list of genres into which the programs on thatpage fit. Then briefly try to define several of the genres by identifying their purpose andenumerating their conventions. For example, The O’Reilly Factor might be placed in thenews/talk or news/opinion genre, in which hosts with political axes to grind debate hot-button political issues with figures in the news.

5. Identify a text that you have experienced in at least two different media: book and film,stage play and film, film and TV version, TV and newspaper, magazine and newspaper,original painting and reproduction, digital photo and print photo. As best you can, explainand then analyze the differences you experienced between the works.

“Coming up in yourrearview mirror, it[the Chrysler 300C]looks meaner thanDick Cheney in aduck blind with ahangover and acold. It would makea great cop car. It is so dope.”

—JAMIE KITTMAN“All American?”

Automobile, June 2004

Jan Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance (1664)

Heaney, an Irish poet, uses simple images, occasional rhymes, and irregularrhythms to present a moment when the memory of a much-loved womaneases the pain of her loss.

■ ■ ■

Sometimes you notice the sheer novelty of a text or design before all else. Yousee something you don’t expect and so you look again and again. That’s part ofthe charm of Borrell’s Escaping Criticism, and it certainly contributes to both thefame and the appeal of architect Frank Gehry’s most famous buildings, whichhave a style of their own. Their sweeping facades, crooked walls, and Alice inWonderland corridors challenge architectural conventions in ways people findentertaining or absurd. Either way, people pay attention. But then they probably

begin thinking about them in terms oftheir genres too. After all, even aGehry building has to serve a particu-lar purpose—as a concert hall, a cam-pus building, a museum. What shouldbuildings of this type do? And howwell does the Gehry version meet thoseexpectations? These are questions crit-ics have addressed and are the samesort of questions you should ask onceyou’ve decided what something is.

Disney Concert Hall

Stata Center, MIT

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What is it about? Books, articles, movies, images, and even ads have to do more than just gainyour attention. They have to hold it, and they can do that by offering a sub-ject worth your attention, one that gets you thinking.

I D E N T I F Y T H E S U B J E C T The subject matter of a text can be signaledin an almost infinite number of ways. A topic may be simply and clearly an-nounced—as is the case in reference works, textbooks, and research reports.Titles, too, can define subject matter—though they can also be mysterious, de-liberately elusive, or provocative. Consider how Borrell’s painting at the be-ginning of this chapter is limited by its title Escaping Criticism. Now imaginehow the work would change if its title were Playing Hooky.

Often the subject matter of a text has to be inferred or interpreted. A book orfilm may just seem to tell a story. What is the subject matter of the Lord of theRings trilogy? In some ways, it’s the story of a Hobbit with a mission to destroya sinister ring. But on other levels, it may be a reiteration of the heroic myths ofWestern culture or a retelling of the Second World War or yet another unfurlingof a good-versus-evil saga. The effort to understand the subject matter of a

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Ncomplex text is one of the pleasures of reading. Great works tempt us to returnto them often to discover new, different, and sometimes contradictory meanings.

Of course, you need to be able to explain how you found those meanings in atext. A text should provide evidence for the interpretations you offer.

U N D E R S T A N D T H E P U R P O S E As is probablyclear, the treatment of a subject is almost always con-nected to the purpose of a work. A given text may serveany number of purposes. It may evoke personal reflec-tion, like a family portrait or photograph. It may arousememories, like an urban cityscape or a rural scene. It maybe quietly decorative, like a piece of sculpture on a lawn,or robustly informative and pushy, like a traffic sign. Atext may try to seduce you, change you, persuade you, ormove you to action. And it may do several things atonce or different things at different times: A figure suchas Uncle Sam may incite good humor at a Fourth of Julyparade and patriotic fervor on a recruitment poster.

Texts shouldn’t always make you suspicious. But youshould read them carefully to see what they are tellingyou and for what purpose.

E X A M P L E S On the day following September 11,2001, it’s unlikely that readers of American newspaperswere trying to learn what had happened the day before.More probably, they were already looking for reactions tothe terrorist attack on New York City and Washington,D.C., with assessments of its consequences. The SanFrancisco Examiner signals its subject matter and purpose by three all-cap headings: SPECIAL EDITION,BASTARDS! and A CHANGED AMERICA. The cover pho-tograph provides all the evidence necessary to explainthose headings. Related photos have the same impact inthe Arizona Republic and the Hartford Courant and simi-lar relationships to their headlines.

But the subject matter of a front page may not be thesame when borders are crossed. Compare the reactions inAlbuquerque, New Mexico, and Calgary, British Columbia,to the death of U.S. President Ronald Reagan at a momentwhen the Canadian city had a team playing for theStanley Cup.

■ ■ ■

Front pages from the September 12, 2001 editions of the San Francisco Examiner,Arizona Republic, and Hartford Courant newspapers

Front pages from the June 6, 2004 editions of theAlbuquerque Journal and the Calgary Sun

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Sometimes the purpose of a text isn’t immediately visible. On the campus ofthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology, architect Frank Gehry was askedto replace Building 20 with a new structure—what would become the Ray andMaria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences. Toan outsider, MIT sacrificed an undistinguished heap for a world-class newstructure. But as always, there’s more here that meets the eye, as RobertCampbell and Peter Vanderwarker explain.

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To what does it relate?Every book, article, painting, sculpture, cartoon, photograph—you name it—exists within a context. Several, in fact. Context is nothing more or less thanthe who, what, where, when, and why that surround every word, image, or artifact. We read every text wanting to know how it meshes with the world,both now and in the past (if it has a past yet).

C O N S I D E R C O N T E X T S We probably notice context most when we’remissing some part of it. Works that are anonymous or not reliably dated leave usguessing about their origins and wanting to know more. But centuries don’t haveto pass to erase a text’s neighborhood. So much stuff gets lost or displaced in ourdaily lives that there is even a periodical—Found Magazine, from Ann Arbor,

C O N S I D E R

1. Working in a group, imagine some thoughtful alternative titles for Pere Borrell’s EscapingCriticism . How do your new titles change the subject matter of the piece or the wayviewers might encounter it?

2. We’re accustomed to seeing titles on papers, books, paintings, and poems. But whereelse do you find titles or “subject lines” that help you understand what a text might beabout? Describe several of these items and how they function. Be open-minded, consid-ering a wide variety of media.

3. The advertisements in glossy magazines are obviously designed to persuade you to buyproducts. But do some of them have aims that move beyond the purely commercial? Findand examine several such “soft-sell” ads that either make their sales pitches indirectly orseem to champion a worthy social cause. Do you find such strategies appealing or offen-sive? Are they effective? What might such advertisements really be selling? Explain.

“Building 20’s greatness was its absence of architecture. In a building so lacking in char-acter, it was impossible to establish academicor social hierarchies. Everyone was equal, andscience was democratic, creative, and free-wheeling. You could perform improbable experiments or bang holes in walls or roofs toconnect up new equipment, because nobodycared what happened to Building 20. The result, say scientists, was the most productivebuilding of its size in American history.”

—ROBERT CAMPBELL AND PETER VANDERWARKER“Building for Science,” New York Times, April 18, 2004

“The Stata Center . . . is the opposite. It tries to do with architecture whatBuilding 20 did by not having any. Thearchitect is the world’s currently mostfamous, Frank Gehry, whose Walt DisneyConcert Hall in Los Angeles opened lastfall to general acclaim. At Stata, Gehry’splayful shapes create a partylike atmos-phere. And his architectural swoops andcollisions make for a building that will always look as if it’s still underconstruction. The building is a metaphor for the cutting-edge innovationthat will occur, it is hoped, in its labs, offices, and classrooms.”

—ROBERT CAMPBELL AND PETER VANDERWARKER“Building for Science,” New York Times, April 18, 2004

Building 20, MIT

Stata Center, MIT

on the winter sidewalk sat half a photograph—i looked around but i couldn’t find the other half anywhere. on the back i can make out the partial word “acova (19)” and beneath that “Greece”

what sort of emotions made the owner tear it inhalf? and what was in the other half of the picture?

—NIKOLAUS MAACKFound Magazine

greece gone wrong, found by nikolaus maack,ottawa, ontario, canada

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Sandra Cisneros than an Italian American, who might in turn have plenty tosay about The Sopranos, much of it critical. And so on down the line through afull roster of religious, ethnic, gender, cultural, and even physical differences.And the key here is differences. The contexts we bring to texts personally aren’ta matter of right and wrong; they are crucially distinct ways of seeing.

E X A M P L E S To many Americans, the images from the attack on the WorldTrade Center in 2001 seemed unreal—more like something from a Hollywooddisaster film such as Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), or, mosteerily, The Towering Inferno (1979). A look at the film poster explains whypeople might have made such a connection.

Contexts can be quite personal, based on one’s own experiences and knowl-edge. A building like Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT is just the sort to gen-erate all sorts of odd associations. This sophisticated structure probablystrikes many as oddly childlike or playful, like buildings they remember frompicture books or science fiction tales. Film buffs may have a startling differ-ent take on the Stata Center. It may remind them of The Cabinet of Dr.

Michigan, with a Web site at FoundMagazine.com—for people eager to share dis-placed objects they discover in odd places, from garbage cans to crowded attics.

In presenting such fragments of people’s pasts, Found raises just the sorts ofquestions you should consider when encountering a text unfamiliar to you:

■ Who made it?

■ When was it composed?

■ To what does it respond?

■ What trends, fashions, or attitudes does it represent?

■ Who was or is the audience for the text?

■ How did people respond to it initially?

In some ways, uncovering the context of atext breathes new life into it. This renewalmakes an important point about context: Italways changes. But context isn’t only amatter of discovering in what year the origi-nal Shrek was released or how popularRubber Soul was when it debuted or whyDorothea Lange photographed migrant work-ers during the Great Depression. Sometimesyou also have to connect a work to currentevents or popular culture to understand it.Editorial cartoons in newspapers demonstratethis principle about as well as any item.Stephen Breen of the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for cartooning, but one of his award-winning sub-missions would already be puzzling to people who don’t know or recall thatthen President Bill Clinton was criticized for using White House social events toraise funds for his campaign. Breen’s imaginative presidential seal—with its cof-fee cup, telephone, dollar signs, and “Show me the money” motto—would nowhave to be explained to many readers, though it made perfect sense in 1998.

E X P L O R E P E R S O N A L A S S O C I A T I O N S You may bring your ownhighly personal associations to reading and responding to texts. Writers andartists may stimulate your imagination, but they cannot control it. Nor canthey anticipate the layers of history and memory that any individual or groupbrings to the world. By birth, education, and experience, we all come to textsdifferently, find different things in them, and respond in unique ways. Thesepersonal connections are so important that they shape many of the responsesyou bring to a work. A Chicana may identify more powerfully with a work by

Editorial cartoon by Stephen Breen (1998)

Poster for The Towering Inferno (1979)

How is it composed?Many kids go through a phase when they take things apart. Even if the re-sults are sometimes catastrophic, the impulse is a good one. Seeing how thepieces of a clock, VCR, or talking doll fit together can give a hands-on feelfor the way the object actually works.

T A K E T H E T E X T A P A R T You usually can’t disassemble texts you readquite the same way, but to understand them, you’ll want to develop a similarsense for how their parts work together. You’ll quickly discover that composi-tion is a complex activity differing widely from medium to medium. Yet cer-tain strategies for reading structure and organization apply widely.

Look for elements that give unity to a text. A work that is unified seems todevelop a dominant idea, theme, or feeling. That doesn’t mean that a workexpresses only one notion but that its elements seem coherent or stay onmessage.

Look for sequences that link events or different parts of a text. For example,a story may be organized by a plot that explains what happened first, whathappened second, and so on. Even when flashbacks or reminiscences (tech-niques especially common in movies) interrupt such tales, you can still usu-ally assemble a coherent sequence. Many other kinds of works use numbersor progressions to keep things in order, from timelines and sonnet sequencesto slide shows and movies on DVD. Even chapters and other divisions inbooks are numbered to give order to a work.

Look to the way a whole is divided into parts. Many texts are organized bysome principle of division that helps us see relationships. Sometimes that di-vision is quite simple—just a breakdown of an idea or object into separableitems, like the tracks on a CD or rows in a garden. But texts can also be orga-nized by more thoughtful principles based on a rigorous classification ofideas, images, or even colors and shapes.

Look for patterns that organize a text. Repetitions of any kind stick in ourminds and help us read texts. Consider the power of repetition and rhythm inmusic—and how easily you can distinguish between the verses of a song and itschorus. You’ll find patterns, large and small, in written texts too that help orga-

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C O N S I D E R

1. Examine an editorial cartoon in a newspaper today. What is the context for the item:What kinds of knowledge does a reader need to get the cartoonist’s point? How well in-formed does the cartoonist assume the reader is? How well would the item work adecade from today?

2. Go to theonion.com, and pick a story at least a few paragraphs long. Then list all the cul-tural connections you would need to recognize in order to understand it fully. You mightwant to work on this assignment with a group since one person may not catch all the al-lusions. How funny will the story be a year from now, five years from now, a century fromnow? Will it even be comprehensible?

3. Find a personal object in your closet, attic, or elsewhere, that has not aged well—it mightbe a piece of clothing, an ugly radio, a picture of an old pet or car, a graduation present,or a souvenir. As well as you can, explain how the object is connected to you throughmemories and associations. What might you want other people to know about the objectif it showed up in Found magazine?

4. Pick a film released prior to 1975, and do as much research as you can to describe the worldinto which it premiered and the way it is regarded now. Choose a film that has some standingtoday. For example, what attracted audiences to The Wizard of Oz in 1939? What struck themas new or different? What other films debuted that year? Did producers of the film anticipatethat The Wizard of Oz would become a classic? How is the film regarded now?

Caligari, a classic movie from the silent era whose sets featured memorablydistorted buildings and streets. These expressionistic sets have been inter-preted as the manifestation of a lead character’s madness or as a criticism ofthe German government. For Gehry, however, the peculiar geometry seems toexpress new architectural possibilities. Still, the connection offers tantalizingpossibilities for a response to Gehry’s architecture.

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Still from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

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“The real meaning of form ismade clearer by its opposite.”

—JAN TSCHICHOLDThe New Typography

Look for contrasts that organize information by focusing attention. Contrastis what makes black text on a white page stand out. Many texts are organizedon the same principle: that we see things more clearly when they stand nextto their opposites. That is as true of ideas as of colors and shapes. Contrastguides many kinds of works, from traditional comparison-and-contrast es-says and pro-and-con arguments to visual and aural pieces of all sorts. Thepainter Caravaggio, for example, invented dramatic lighting effects to shapecomplex and graphic scenes of unusual power. Photographers, too, particu-larly those working in black and white, use patterns of light and dark tostructure their work and make us more aware of patterns.

Look for a hierarchy in texts. Some things are more important than others,and texts use various devices to signal what is of greater and lesser impor-tance: size, color, highlighting, positioning, placement, length, and so on. Allof these cues help guide you through a text. For instance, the size and style ofheadings and subheadings in books may mark the difference between chaptertitles and subheads at various levels of importance.

nize them. Any work written to a formula, from a biology lab report to ascreenplay for a movie, is following a pattern that readers are trained to recog-nize. And naturally, patterns play an enormous role in organizing visual texts.The facades of buildings, for instance, typically present us with many patterns,subtly varied to keep us interested. Look for both: pattern and variation.

Look for arrangement and balance. The physical layout of elements in a textcan be an important structural feature. In an image such as a photograph, asingle dominant figure front and center has a different impact than two fig-ures who are balanced, positioned off center, or counterbalanced by other ele-ments. Your eye moves in different ways in encountering and reacting to sucharrangements. As a result some texts seem static; others feel more dynamic.

Clockwise from left:

Photo with a single figure balanced front and center

Photo with two figures in motion, off center

Photo with two figures, balanced and centered

Michelangelo da Caravaggio, David and Goliath (c. 1600)

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E X A M P L E S Why do sonnets remain such a popular form of poetry? Onereason is certainly their challenging structure, which seems simple but de-mands great skill from poets. A typical sonnet runs only fourteen lines, longenough to develop a clever thought without belaboring it (or exhausting thepatience of readers). Sonnets also entertain readers with prescribed rhymeschemes that challenge the ingenuity of poets. But there’s yet another struc-tural demand: The poem must execute a turn in its thinking at just the rightmoment. In the Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, that shift usually occurs afterline eight; in the Shakespearean or English sonnet, the turn occurs in the cou-plet that follows the twelfth line.

And somehow, as a poet jumps these technical hurdles, the poem must stillsound easy, passionate, natural, and sincere. A reader aware of what the poet isaccomplishing almost wants to applaud as the requirements are met. In a tourde force, Shakespeare even went so far as to weave the complex architecture of

U N D E R S T A N D H O W T H E P A R T S W O R K T O G E T H E R Consideralso how the elements of a text work together to achieve an effect. If it helps,think about how you yourself “compose” a photograph on vacation, gettingyour friends (one tall, one short) in just the right relationship to the mountainbehind them and the tree in front of them. You move in, move out, try differ-ent camera angles, and maybe frame the shot with a convenient overhanginglimb. Thanks to digital photography, you may be able to judge the results im-mediately. Perhaps you’ve nailed the shot. More likely, you may have to re-compose it to better capture your sense of the moment. Composition can be amatter of trial and error and of juggling many different concerns, elements,and techniques.

For example, some photographers organize their shotsusing what they call the “rule of thirds.” Employingthis principle, photographers avoid centering the mostimportant elements in a photograph. Instead, they po-sition them roughly at the points where imaginarylines, both horizontal and vertical, divide an imageinto thirds. (In the photo, note that the head of theking is exactly at one of those intersections.) The ruleis not hard and fast. Sometimes an image requiresmore balance or symmetry. But the eye seems to re-spond well to structures that promote complex or in-triguing relationships, as the rule of thirds does.

Clarity is another important element in composition.In successful graphs, charts, and tables, for example,various elements must mesh to make numbers andtheir relationships easy to read and interpret. Notehow “Population Growth” achieves such claritythrough its simple composition. Red bars rising abovea zero line indicate growth in population; dark bluebars descending from the same line show populationdecline. Alternating vertical columns of light blue andgray separate the names of the ten countries studied,while horizontal white lines map out the levels of

growth or decline. Thanks to this simple, highly patterned structure, a readercan tell immediately which countries will grow in population over the nextfifty years (and by how much) and which will decline. Conventions like thoseused in bar graphs have evolved over the years and they have to be learned.Most readers are familiar with them today—as they are with line graphs (use-ful for tracking changes over time or showing trends) and pie charts (effectivedevices for displaying part-to-whole distributions).

Clockwise from top left:

Bar graph

Pie chart

Line graph

Photo with grid lines showingthe “rule of thirds”

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C O N S I D E R

1. In writing courses, you’ve probably been introduced to patterns and structures such asdescription, narration, process analysis, classification, comparison and contrast, andanalogy. Try to apply two of the patterns you recognize or recall to a medium other thanwriting. For instance, a process analysis explains how something is done. In what othermedia might you expect to see explanations of how to do or create something?

2. Look for photographs in magazines or online—or perhaps some you have taken yourself—that seem to violate the rule of thirds. Would the photographs have been more dynamic ifthey followed the guideline? Why or why not? Try to explain when it might feel right tocenter a subject.

the sonnet into his play Romeo and Juliet. When the tragic young lovers meetfor the first time, for example, they speak to each other in, yes, a sonnet:

romeo: (1) If I profane with my unworthiest hand (2) This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: (3) My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand (4) To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

juliet: (5) Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,(6) Which mannerly devotion shows in this; (7) For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,(8) And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

romeo: (9) Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

juliet: (10) Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

romeo: (11) O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; (12) They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

juliet: (13) Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

romeo: (14) Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.

■ ■ ■

Texts that challenge your expectations may be the hardest to read. Becauseyou don’t recognize the patterns or structures according to which they arecomposed, you may tend to dismiss them or even ridicule them—until theystart to look more familiar because you’ve begun to understand them. (Ofcourse, you can still dislike them, but perhaps more knowledgeably.) FrankGehry’s buildings challenge almost every popular convention of architec-ture. Their dizzying facades, curved surfaces, and seemingly random shapesmake them look, some would argue, more heaped than composed. Yet theyare designed to open up possibilities for both the people who use the build-ings and those who design other works in Gehry’s wake. Gehry’s workwouldn’t be possible without computers figuring out how to bend materialsinto the odd shapes he envisions. But now that machines give architects thisnew freedom, why not use it? Why shouldn’t buildings entertain us? Gehrydares us to welcome new shapes into our lives.

“The Stata [Center at MIT] is always going to look unfinished.It also looks as if it’s about to collapse. Columns tilt at scaryangles. Walls teeter, swerve, and collide in random curvesand angles. Materials change wherever you look: brick, mirror-surface steel, brushed aluminum, brightly coloredpaint, corrugated metal. Everything looks improvised, as if

thrown up at the last moment.That’s the point. The Stata’s appearance is a metaphor for thefreedom, daring, and creativity of the research that’s supposed to occur inside it.”

—ROBERT CAMPBELL“Dizzying Heights,” Boston Globe,

April 25, 2004

Stata Center, MIT

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What details matter?Books, articles, movies, photographs, buildings, and even ads—especiallyads—must do more than just gain your attention. They have to hold it. Ifyou’ve ever picked up a supermarket tabloid, you probably know what hap-pens when the details of a story don’t live up to a sensational headline.

Successful texts get you thinking beyond their first impressions by offeringup rich details. You may not notice these details initially because they are de-liberately secondary—like the separate stones that make up an arch. But re-move one stone and watch what happens. In written texts, it’s often the de-tails that provide support for a claim or make a story plausible. In visualtexts, the details enrich or complicate our initial experience and encourage usto look again and again. In music, the backbeat may be what defines a songand makes it memorable or tuneful.

L O O K C L O S E L Y Because of the sheer variety of texts, it’s hard to providegeneral directions for paying attention to details beyond the obvious: Read,look, and listen carefully. Still, some habits might be useful in appreciatingthe details in a text.

■ Don’t trust first impressions. They may very well be wrong or misleading,especially when something you are reading is truly new or moves con-trary to your expectations.

■ Assume that more may be going on than you suspect. Read any textimaginatively and creatively. Take for granted that someone has paidcareful attention while creating it and that all its elements serve a pur-pose. In particular, look for connections between the primary aim, theme,or thesis of the work and all the supporting details.

■ Approach every text, especially a familiar or conventional one, as if youwere encountering it for the first time. Sometimes we stop paying atten-tion when the terrain we are covering seems familiar—like driving thesame road every day.

■ Examine how the graphic details contribute to a work. Study the lightingtechnique used by the photographer, the brushstrokes of a painter, the

similes and metaphors of a writer, and so on. Learn as much as you canabout any texts you encounter often.

■ Think about what the text has excluded or left out. Pay attention to theframing or cropping of an image, the topics not covered in an article ornewspaper, the people whose names or faces aren’t represented in a work.These omissions may prove to be more than a matter of detail.

E X A M I N E T H E P O I N T O F V I E W For example, perspective—the il-lusion of depth in paintings—is a detail you may not notice the first time youlook at a work of art. Yet perspective contributes significantly to your experi-ence. Artists can decide whether their subjects will imitate life in three di-mensions or whether flattening or distorting these items better serves theirends. Similarly, point of view—what a photographer calls the “camera an-gle”—can give shape to a composition and highlight specific themes.Illustrator and painter Mark Ulriksen manipulates both perspective and pointof view in his images of our canine friend. These elements in his paintingsencourage us to see our relationships with dogs in new ways.

Mark Ulriksen, Puppy Love (2001): Distant, high angle

Mark Ulriksen, Little Dog (2000): Close up, low angle

42 R E A D I N G T E X T S 43

What actually ends up in an image isan important detail too, one that’s easyto overlook because what we see canseem like the whole story, complete initself. Notice how photographer BillGreene crops his photo of the audienceat the 2004 graduation at BostonCollege to provide a selective view ofthe event, which featured speaker TimRussert. It’s doubtful that all the stu-dents were quite so bored by the NBCcommentator’s commencement ad-

dress, but the shot leaves that impression—one that irritated officials at theschool. But consider how much less interesting the image would be if we sawmore of the graduates.

Of course, any photograph can be cropped for deliberate effect, a process nowmuch easier for an amateur using a digital camera to manage. Your subjectdoesn’t even have to fit within a traditional frame. It may be more powerful ifparts get clipped off.

In fact, digital photography now makes it possible to alter photographs inways only dictators could do formerly, eliminating inconvenient people witha click of the mouse.

Bill Greene, Boston Collegegraduation (2004)

Photograph before and after digital cropping

N O T I C E W H A T ’ S M I S S I N G Whatmay be even more difficult to notice thancropping or framing is what’s not in a

text to begin with. The Wall Street Journalhas one of the most distinctive and tradi-

tional designs of any major newspaper. But itmay take a moment or more for you to realizethat something very familiar is missing from itspages—photographs. The absence of photographs

reflects the philosophy of the paper and its fo-cus on hard news. But the Journal is not with-out images. In fact, since 1979 it has used aunique form of illustration called “hedcuts,”

portraits built from dots and lines designed to complement rather than over-whelm the surrounding print. Based on photographs but drawn by artists, hed-cuts have become one of the enduring pleasures of American journalism, atleast among readers who don’t miss the photographs. It’s a detail that adds tothe experience of reading the newspaper.

E X A M P L E S Can the details ever be more important than the focal point ofa text? Yes, it happens all the time, especially in material that deals with sta-tistics and factual information. Consider the bar graph tracking populationgrowth over the next fifty years. The focal point may be the title, but mostreaders would linger there only a moment before moving on to the fascinat-ing numbers. (Did you imagine that the United States would grow faster thanChina?) The chart was created by Hamish McRae using statistics provided bythe United Nations.

“I always thoughtthat one word wasworth a thousandpictures.”

—FRED TAYLORformer executive editor

of the Wall Street Journal

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and vital before the critics get to him. And of course, we have no way of know-ing where he is heading except that he’s stepping into our world, blurring theline between reality and illusion.

■ ■ ■

Some poems seem almost entirely about the details: They ask us to pay atten-tion to what is right in front of us. Consider the spare but specific images inthis deceptively simple poem.

W i l l i a m C a r l o s W i l l i a m sThe Red Wheelbarrow(1923)

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

Notice how the arrangement of the lines compels you to examine each wordcarefully and to think about its meaning and placement. This is poetry inwhich every detail matters. It may lack the complex structure of aShakespearean sonnet or the wealth of allusion in one of Seamus Heaney’spoems. But it makes its point just as memorably.

■ ■ ■

“The street is lined with colorful walls and with benches and niches for conversation,some alongside giant blackboards and bulletin boards. Curving staircases climb abovethe street at both ends, and catwalks above it give access to upper-level areas. The building’s interior doesn’t inspire awe the way a cathedral might, but its angledplanes and unexpected curves are likely to delight anyone walking among them. So will hanging walls that seem to defy gravity, or at least logic, and occasionalglimpses of odd, high towers that would look right at home in a Dr. Seuss book.”

—LAWRENCE BIEMILLER“MIT Splices Whimsy into Its Architectural DNA,”

Chronicle of Higher Education, May 7, 2004

Floor plan of the Stata Center

Stata Center, MIT

While a stunning piece of architecture can be fun to look at, its details will de-termine how livable it will be. Frank Gehry’s Stata Center Building at MIT makesa visual statement from every angle, but its odd shapes, complex surfaces, andopen corridors contribute to goals set by MIT administrators, who wanted abuilding that encouraged community and collaboration. So the building juxta-poses classrooms, laboratories, offices, and corridors (called “student streets”) inways that ease movement and communication. Even the building materials,ranging from brick to stainless steel, challenge expectations and entertain theeye with unexpected shapes and surfaces. The Stata Center is not a building thatcan be taken in at a glance or navigated confidently. But its distinctive featureshave earned names such as Nose, Helmet, and Kiva that steer visitors in the rightdirection. The endless details make the building more than the sum of its parts.

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C O N S I D E R

1. Describe how the varying perspectives and points of view in the two Ulriksen dog paint-ings dictate your response to them. Do the titles of the paintings make a difference aswell?

C O M P O S E

2. A surprising number of people have never paid much attention to the details of the storytold in the first verse of the national anthem of the United States of America:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Study the verse and, in a paragraph, summarize precisely what is happening in the song.Who might be speaking? When did the action begin? What do we know by the end of theverse? If you are brave, summarize the story told in the complete anthem—all fourverses. You can find the other three verses easily on the Web.

3. Borrell’s Escaping Criticism is a detail woven throughout this chapter. Review the chapterto see how often and where it is mentioned. What is the effect of this repetition on yourreading? How does the image contribute to your overall impression of the chapter? Doyou find it an important element or a distracting detail?

4. If you have access to digital photographs and software by which to crop and manipulateimages, choose a single photograph you have taken and rework it several ways. Then pre-sent those images to your classmates, explaining how manipulating the details mightchange the purpose of the photograph. Here, for example, is a color photograph of vul-tures on a suburban chimney, cropped and manipulated to create first a more sinisterand then a more abstract image, using nothing fancier than iPhoto and Microsoft Word.