Composition: Writing and the Visual Arts

Abstract

What can an artist teach us about how to write an essay? What one learns from the study of visual harmony and the mixing of lines and shapes may not be obvious to the Introductory Composition student, but it can help in the revising process. Often when college students are asked to revise their drafts, they insert, delete, or change material without considering the effect on the entire composition. Current approaches to revision, although beneficial, frequently remain too abstract for Introductory Composition students who cannot recognize the absence of harmonious connections between paragraphs or identify expressions that might convey a vague meaning to a reader.1 Faced with this difficulty while teaching Introductory Composition at the University of Michigan, I sought a way to help my students visualize the revision process. I started with the assumption that student writers can learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers, because there is a connection between writing and the visual arts (drawing, painting).2 The comparison of these art forms has a long history that began in antiquity. Both Plato and Horace, for instance, compare poems to pictures.3 But I am bold enough to make this comparison again to advance a method for teaching revision. It struck me that the way in which a painter moves from sketch to completed painting could serve as an analogue for a way of progressing from draft to final paper. This discussion reports on and generalizes from classroom experiments that used the visual arts to teach students to revise. It emphasizes what instructors and students can learn about written composition from methods of composing used by visual artists through an analysis of J. D. Ingres's sketches for the Portrait of the Comtesse d'Haussonville.