Visuospatial Thinking in the Professional Writing Classroom

Journal of Business and Technical Communication Apr 2011

Visuospatial Thinking in the Professional Writing Classroom

Claire Lauer Arizona State University ; Christopher A. Sanchez Arizona State University

Abstract

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.

Journal: Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published: 2011-04-01
DOI: 10.1177/1050651910389149
Open Access: Closed
Topics: multimodality professional writing

Citation Context

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Blythe et al. (2014)

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Examining the Effect of Reflective Assessment on the Quality of Visual Design A…

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CrossRef global citation count: 13 View in citation network →