![]() To fully comprehend the story, we have to take in every letter that is part of the deal we make as readers with the writer. Yet we know that, when faced with a page of text, we need to start in the upper left-hand corner and work across the page, word by word, to understand it, and then move downward to the next line until we reach the bottom right corner of the page. If we skim a page of text, details can be missed and plot points overlooked. And of course, like silent movies, pictures don’t need to be translated for people who speak different languages. We can understand the idea of sadness without having to label it with a word. Visual understanding can transcend language. We might look at a drawing of a character’s face and understand that the character is sad without thinking (or hearing in our minds) the word “sad”. It’s possible for a visual story to advance without making an equivalent automatic translation to words. This translation from words to images in our mind occurs unbidden.īut looking at visual narratives does something different. We construct visual images of characters and locations based partly on the actual text, and partly on our own experiences, our own biases, our own dreams. When we read, pictures often form automatically in our minds. ![]()
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