Writing as a Visual Art

Book excerpt: Tonfoni (linguistics, U. of Bologna, Italy) has published many books in Italian and in English, has been a visiting scholar at MIT and Harvard University, and has presented her methodolgoy in many settings. Here she describes a highly developed approach to writing that quite specifically involves drawing, painting, and visual symbols as a means of representing the structure of various kinds of writing. With these structures in mind, she suggests that students can improve, vary, and significantly expand their writing repertoire. The bibliographic history of this book is somewhat elusive: It is a paperbound edition of a work first published in Britain by Intellect Books (UK), apparently in 1993 (from the date on the author's preface). James Richardson is credited with "abridging" the volume, but the original source volume is not identified (or perhaps it was not published). Marvin Minsky, famed as a founder of artificial intelligence, provides a lengthy foreword. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR