Pictures Worth a Thousand Words and Worthless Planning

Envision Chapter 4

Journal 4

The cliché, “Pictures are worth a thousand words,” doesn’t even begin to scratch the service of analyzing rhetorically. Chapter four of Envision focuses on planning and proposing research arguments. First, the chapter focuses on asking research questions.

After reading the first few pages of the chapter I realized, pictures aren’t worth a thousand words. They’re worth a thousand questions! We so often look at pictures and posters and sub-consciously answer many rhetorical questions by just the first glance.

The rest of the chapter talks about planning writing through clustering and freewriting, which, to me, is a big waste of time. I am the kind of person who is all about scheduling and punctuality. I like to have things planned ahead of time and know what to expect. There is only one thing I do not plan, and that is my writing. If I spend all my time making webs and clustering facts about a topic, then I lose the enthusiasm and the emotion I feel for the topic. I like to think up phrases that introduce the topic and let the ideas flow from there. Sure, it involves quite a bit of adjusting, but I never lose my emotion toward the assignment. I never liked all the technical “how to’s” of planning writing. Planning writing should be done by one’s own means, not by some specified guidelines.