Diana George’s primary argument is that due to the way children’s imaginations thrive when working with images, composition courses should include visual communications. She recognizes that today’s children grow up in a very visual culture. Before they are students or even able to read words, children are reading images. George advocates for teachers to recognize this growing pattern and to adjust composition education accordingly.
Her argument is very much connected to the idea of multiliteracies. The previously read articles emphasize on how the growth of multimedia has created various new literacies (print text, digital text, video, presentation, etc.). One of the literacies mentioned is that in visual communication. Even Eyman’s article touches on multiliteracies when he mentions how closely tied visual rhetoric is to digital rhetoric. In George’s article, she recognizes media’s creation of previously nonexistent literacies when she recounts the history of visuals in classrooms. However, mass media now “permeates” communication, to the point that we must begin “thinking of composition as design” (George 18). This is not to say that visual arguments must stand on their own. Rather, they must interact, like the multiliteracies’ modes of meaning, with text and other means to create a unified message.
Literacy means more than words, and visual literacy means more than play.
Diana George, p. 116
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