Seeing the Text

The physical fact of the text, with its spatial appearance on the page, requires visual apprehension: a text can be seen, must be seen, in a process which is essentially different from the perception of speech. The written mode necessitates the arrangement of script or typeface, a process which gives visual cues to the verbal organization of the text. We might think of texts arranged along a continuum, from texts at one end which convey relatively little information visually, to texts at the opposite end which reveal substantial information through such visible cues as white space, illustrations, variation in typeface, and use of nonalphabetic symbols, such as numbers, asterisks, and punctuation. In terms of this continuum, an essay would fall well toward the nonvisually informative end. Certainly, paragraph indentation, margins, capitalization, and sentence punctuation provide some information to the reader, but such information is extremely limited, with most of the cues as to organization and logical relations buried within the text. At the other extreme of the continuum would be texts which display their structure, providing the reader/viewer with a schematic representation of the divisions and hierarchies which organize the text.