12.2 Writing About the Visual: Summary and Description

Some of the most important skills to hone in Composition courses are analysis-based skills such as summary, description, evaluation, and interpretation.

It might seem peculiar to use a visual work—like a painting or sculpture—to practice your writing skills. After all, the focus of English Composition is language—we are paying attention to how words are used—and paintings and sculptures don’t typically include words. But choosing a visual object to summarize and describe can be a smart strategy for a couple of reasons.

First, sometimes when students are asked to summarize an essay, article, or book, the first tendency is to search the internet and find a summary that someone else has written, perhaps an overview of the reading that has been posted on Wikipedia, Shmoop, GradeSaver, or SparkNotes. The student may believe that they are well-intentioned in searching out a summary someone else has written—just wanting to check and see that their own ideas about how to summarize the reading are on par—but the student succumbs to the temptation to copy the online summary, substitute some words, change around a few parts of speech, and rearrange the word order. Not only is this an academic integrity issue, since this is a form of plagiarism, but it robs the student of the opportunity to develop their own summary and description skills.

On the other hand, when you are focused on describing what you see when you look at a visual creation, you take away the pressure to use someone else’s words and you never veer down the risky road of half-copying, patch-writing, and plagiarism.

The second benefit of writing about the visual is that it gives you the challenge of invention, creating the opportunity to increase your analysis skills. Writing about fine art forces you not only to describe but to translate—from a visual language to a written one. You have to ask yourself: what are the best words I can use to explain what I am looking at? What is it, truly, that I see when I look at this painting? How could I describe this sculpture so that someone who has never seen it would be able to read my description and picture the sculpture in their mind?

Continue Reading: 12.3 Formalist Analysis: Descriptive Summary