Writing for a Thousand

When I see a fresh piece of origami paper I can see how it folds into a crane. After folding the bird I realise I had forgotten to bring out the instruction book. I am a Visual-Spatial Learner (VSL), I think in pictures. When I hear, see, or remember the word “banana”, a picture of a banana pops like a surprised light bulb into my head. This banana is every single banana I have seen or eaten, from a freshly peeled plantain to a spotted, rotten banana. While I enjoy these images, the other effects of a VSL brain still pursue me like the tail on a dog. I find that I can’t write neatly and I have troubles with taking notes, finding myself doodling on the side of my notebook, if I can find myself, when I can find my notebook. As someone who thinks in pictures I can see a thousand things in every image but cannot conjure a single word to describe one of them. 

If, as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words, then why am I not allowed to ditch the written assignment and sketch this essay for a comparable grade? According to Professor Gerald Grow, a retired journalism professor who helps visual spatial writers adapt, VSLs have difficulty with expository writing because their thoughts do not “translate” into prose. Expository prose, regularly demanded of high school and college students, is assembled through combinations of story, focus, sequence, drama and analysis. Grow posits that VSLs become effectively disabled by that process. Unfortunately, this is true for me, and I still misspell simple words and trip over my sentences; my syntax suffers, and so do my readers. The organisation in the mind of a picture thinker is different from the sequencing demanded by academia, who says, “Get Organized!’.Get Organized? If called to organize, I find difficulty in arranging my baggage in a recognizable order in both real life and real time writing. My backpack looks like Frodo's worst nightmare, but thanks to my spatial awareness, everything in my backpack is mentally mapped out for the journey on pictures in my mind. Like my backpack, my thoughts are all jumbled and spewed untidily across the page.(great for poetry, not so much for sentences) Outlines do not aid me; graphic organizers that look like spiders MIGHT rearrange the chaos in my brain, but only on a good day. After many detours and attempts at sanity, I give up on that nicety, go with the chaos, and I always manage a paper during the last legs of the journey, but the journey itself has been rife with strife.

I am a visual thinker - there are some metaphorical pros, but there are far more debilitating cons. Strong visual memory with moronically weak memory for words  cripples my attempts to communicate verbally or on paper, despite (paradoxically) verbal strengths that most academics would envy. Four paragraphs... twelve hours; yes this is a disability. Two more hours and I might get This One Small Paragraph right. Every artist dreams of walking among the mountain folds and valley folds of origami-like creations. Its like walking on water! The stormy sea of writing, however, is ever and forever a sinking experience.

NCM