Writing for Visual Thinkers

I have been thinking about writing lately.
The issue of clear, organized and thoughtful writing is an issue for me in two areas of my life, my doctoral studies and my role as a homeschooling mother of a child with Aspergers Syndrome.

At the university, the effect of poor writing has become apparent to me as I struggle to understand a series of weekly papers that are required as part of my Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology course. Each week, we read one or two papers that document current research in areas related to the physiology that is covered in lecture. For example, just recently we have been discussing reflex feedback that affects propioception. Differences in how the nervous system deals with reflexes become important when an animal has to couple voluntary motor responses with reflex responses to stimuli. Writing neatly when the pen is jarred would be one example. And our nervous systems deal with these problems in amazing ways, using the neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters to increase and decrease reflexive responses based on the perception of where body parts are within a cycle of movement.

But speaking of writing, what I am noticing is how uniformly poorly written many of the published papers are. And these are papers by respected scientists in good journals. The last paper we read was so dense with jargon, and so poorly structured that it was particularly easy to miss the point, although once I got it (after three readings), it was interesting and important.

As I was contemplating the relatively uniformly low standards for clarity of prose in scientific writing, I was also thinking about where we are with N.'s writing skills. He is getting better at sequencing, especially after practicing by re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic. But when detail becomes dense, sequencing is still a problem. N. tends to become overwhelmed by the details and has difficulty figuring out how to elaborate with them in a sensible and understandable order.

In considering these two different examples of problems with writing, I had a niggling sense that they were somehow related, however, I was unable to put it all together for several days. Finally on Thursday, two conversations I had created the "Aha!" moment I was looking for, and I was able to develop my hypothesis about what was happening. In the first conversation with my professor of Neurophysiology and another student, we noted that the diagrams in the paper were explanatory, but the captions were quite dense and almost unreadable. And we noted that they were misplaced with the text so that the reader had to page back and forth to find the paragraphs where they were discussed. I noted at the time that neuroscientists really like cartoon depictions of processes and maybe this would better help readers access the material. Later that evening, my daughter came home with a stack of posterboard and colored pencils. When I asked if she had presentation, she said that she didn't, but that she needed to draw out the biochemical pathways as they worked in cells in order to really understand them.

MLC then said something curious: "You know, Mom," she said, "My professor is a little weird. When he is explaining a process, he leans his head back so that his nose is in the air and closes his eyes. Strange. It seems like he is kind of stuck up."
"Hmmm," I replied. "It sounds like he has to close his eyes and visualize the process in order to explain it well. He's not stuck up. He's just a little autistic. And look how you have to make a cartoon of the processes as they occur in the cell to really get at what is going on."
"You're right," she said. "Scientists love powerpoints where they can make cartoons. The more animation, the better."

Eureka! There's the connection. Many scientists are visual thinkers. We love pictures, diagrams and graphs. Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, we think of them as replacing words, and we make them do that whenever possible. The same is true for people with ASD. Temple Grandin's book, Thinking in Pictures, rings true for a reason. Many people on the spectrum, and their relatives with the broader autistic phenotype, think primarily in images. According to respected experts in the field of remedial reading, the same is true for those dyslexia.

For the majority of the population in literate countries, sequencing writing comes naturally because they are thinking in words. But for those who think primarily in pictures, sequencing is a problem for translation into verbal and written expression. Think about it: When you call up a picture in your mind, all the detail is apparent at once. The memory used for the storage and recall in visual thinking, the opticoder (a.k.a. the visual sketchpad) can hold a great deal of information--it appears to be almost infinite--and it can be connected and manipulated with lightning speed. Thus, those who think in pictures do not think sequentially, they think by making connections across categories. This is associative thinking--complete, detail-rich, and very fast. It is also considered to be a learning disability in our auditory-sequential dominated educational system.

Now consider what it would take to put ideas gained from visual thinking into words using either verbal or written language. The information must be sequenced and chunked in order to use auditory working memory, which is very limited in scope--holding about 7 bits of information at once. This seems very tedious and extremely limiting to the visual thinker, who is used to manipulating many more bits of information at once. And then there is the problem of where to start. For example, if I close my eyes, I can see the entire room in which I am sitting, with every detail down to the dust motes dancing in the sunlight from the window. There is a tremendous amount of detailed information in the three dimensional picture in my mind's eye. But if I am asked to describe it, I must immediately begin to make decisions. What is important to say? What is safe to leave out? Where should I begin? At the door? Where I am sitting? The middle of the room? In what order should I describe it? Big stuff first, then the small things? Or should it be according to the space the stuff is in? Colors first? How can I choose? Oh, forget it! The choices become overwhelming.

You get the picture. This is why scientific writing tends to be so dense and jargon-laden. To a visual thinker every detail is important, because one never knows how associations will be made. It is hard, very hard, for the visual thinker to eliminate trees in order to discuss the forest. In the auditory-sequential world, generalizations are understood as shorthand, but in the visual world they are seen as incomplete at best, and at worst, they are lies.

And to add insult to injury, the auditory-sequential world cannot understand what the problem is and tends to diagnose the visual-associative thinkers as stupid and lazy. They can't help it--many of them cannot think in pictures at all. They cannot even imagine what the problem is. In fact, for many philosophers of language, human thought must happen in words and language or it is not considered to be thought at all. The visual thinkers would say that such people have limited perspective. If they can find the words.

To make matters even worse, visual-associative thinking is so fast that on the extremes, such thinkers do not develop the alternative pathway. In order to successfully communicate in society, we must choose which pathway to use to process incoming and outgoing information. Sometimes, we use the visual pathways and sometimes we resort verbal pathways. So, in order to help extreme visual thinkers learn to write clearly, we must first help them develop the alternative pathway and then teach them to use it efficiently.

With N., it really helped to start with his strengths in visual-associative thinking and use those to scaffold to auditory-sequential. We started with sequencing pictures, and since he has all of the stereotypies and special interests of a child with AS, we started with the Titanic, since he was watching the movie over and over again. He made some gains, and then moved on to other interests. But where to go from here?

I think the answer for N. and for the scientists with the dense, jargon-laden papers is the same. It is to tranlate ideas from the pictures in the mind to auditory sequential chunks without sequencing every picture. In other words, I think the next step is to give each picture in the sequence a label, and then fade the use of the pictures. Now auditory-sequential thinkers would probably suggest doing this in one fell swoop, by introducing outlines. To them, outlines with all the fancy lettering, numbering and indentations make perfect sense. But to the visual-associative thinker, this may be too big of a leap. For example, N. tends to start to obsess on the exact spacing, on an exact pattern of lettering and numbering, and loses the point in a swamp of detail.

Fortunately, we do not have to re-invent the wheel here. For N., anything is worth doing if he can do it on the computer. And there are some great programs, such as Inspiration, that allow the use of graphic organizers that can then be turned into an outline with the touch of an icon. You can put pictures into your graphic organizer, or you can use text. Or both. And didn't MLC mention PowerPoint as the first love of geeky scientists? You can do the same thing with that program, in a different context.

Here, then, is a plan for what we want to accomplish in writing this year. In the past, N. would dictate and then I would help him organize his thinking. Now it is time for a little more independence. So this year, we can make some goals about learning the use of Inspiration or PowerPoint, or both, if N. chooses. Then I can help him move from his present level of using pictures to sequence a story with limited detail, to using pictures and text to sequence a story of similar detail, and then fade the pictures entirely, using only text to go from graphic organizers to outlines. Once that goal is successfully accomplished, we might want to move to stories with more complexity and do the same thing. Eventually, the goal is to be able to do this with extemely complex stories and processes.

Now I need to set up a time to talk about writing goals for this year, to see what N. wants to do, and how he wants to fit it in with his current focus--Kamana Wilderness Awareness. And this is going to have to be done with some delicacy. Writing is a sore subject for N. He has been called stupid and lazy too many times and will not be pushed too far beyond his comfort zones. The success rate at each step is going to have to be about 80% or he will lose interest.

The way many teachers unthinkingly label kids who think differently creates a real problem. When teachers call their students stupid, lazy, brain-damaged, and trouble-makers simply because the teacher lacks the imagination to see that there are many variations in how people think, they create the resistance to learning that they then so actively punish. People don't like to fail over and over and be blamed for "not trying" to boot!

Variation is a given in human populations. It is not a crime. Uniformity in a population is a weakness that can lead to trouble. We know this now more than ever, as we unfold the mysteries of the human genome. What I don't understand is why our educational systems are becoming more and more fixated on uniformity even as our science discovers the usefulness of variation. Actually, come to think of it, I think I have a hypothesis for this question, too.

But that's another post!