*Header image is a 100-year-old optical illusion (that might tell a lot about you).
Before We Write: Some Background
Each of you enters this English classroom with a different history and different goal. Some of you love to read and write, and you look forward to improving your skills and experiencing new texts. Some of you, on the other hand, have hated English classes since you became aware of them, and you want only to escape — by climbing out the back window, maybe, if that’s what it takes.
This class is designed with all of you in mind. In fact, it is the mind itself we are studying, because the purpose of this course is not just to have you read and write; it is, more than anything else, to have you think, and to think about how you think. This idea, thinking about thinking, is metacognition, one of the focusing terms for our entire course.
To begin to analyze how you process information and create understanding, we have spent a few weeks looking at grade abatement, which collects the other focusing terms. Now we move into our first writing assignment.
Before that, though, let’s talk about the Gestalt effect. This is a term you only need to be familiar with — it won’t appear on any tests — but the idea of it is easy enough to remember. It’s related to two more terms: inference and implication, which are important skills in reading and writing.
In order to read beyond the superficial details of our texts, and in order to write fluently and effectively, it helps to understand a bit about how the brain creates meaning. The simplest way to approach this is to use that not-so simple term: Gestalt. This is a German word that can be translated into English as “shape,” and it refers to the part of your brain that makes meaning from sensory data.
When we study ourselves, the Gestalt effect is about our perception of the reality in front of us. You process the information given to you in subtly different ways from the people around you, and in here, those differences are important. We will work together to understand what each individual reads and writes. It will be a collective effort.
This initial exercise won’t seem at first to have anything to do with reading or writing, but you are going to work on applying these concepts to the rest of the year’s work. These are analogies, another term you should recognize. An analogy is, to take the definition verbatim from its Wikipedia entry, “a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target).”
Below are several kinds of Gestalt systems taken from various sources, with commentary folded in.
1. The Whole Picture
The above image usually has no meaning for us until we are shown it upside-down. Click the image to flip it, and then read the footnote at the end of this sentence for the title1.
The image perceived as a whole, all at once, after you are given some direction. This is the guiding principal for how we read and write: You piece together meaning component by component, and sometimes it is only in the end that the full picture snaps into place.
2. Filling in the Blanks
In this next example, a triangle will be perceived in picture A, although no triangle has actually been drawn. In pictures B and D the eye will recognize disparate shapes as “belonging” to a single shape, and in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn. This is reification—the way we fill in the blanks to flesh out a complete idea.
The triangle may be easiest to see. The rest are helped by the language we used to name the objects. This is an example of the power of naming: By naming, we grant shape and form to the nameless things around us. Here, B is a black worm wrapped around a white pole; C shows a sphere covered in spikes, much like a mace; D is a snake or sea monster swimming through water, buried beneath the surface at two points.
Recognize that your mind can’t not see these images that way now — not without a supreme effort to break your own Gestalt grouping mechanism and unsee them. In the same way, it’s only through awareness that you can you break your mind’s habits and forge new ones.
3. Flexibility
Next is flexibility (which is technically called multistability). It is best illustrated by optical illusions like these two. Unlike the reification of an image or text, multistability requires flexibility. One must be able to see both the vase and the two faces; one must be able to see both the old lady and the young woman in the optical illusion located here; one must be able to see that Griffin in The Invisible Man is a victim and the villain, or that Romeo and Juliet are victims of fate and, at the same time, responsible for their own deaths; one must see both sides of an argument in order to defend one or the other. Nuance should be the word we keep in mind when we apply this concept to our study of writing, thinking, and reading.
As we move forward, keep the way we discussed these visual examples in your mind. We will move next into descriptive writing, where we will focus on metacognition and word choice.
Title: The Dog. ↩