The Situation
You want you students your students to understand that writers are persuading their readers to think and ‘see’ in a particular way.
The Solution
Every time you read a word, your brain is interpreting the meaning and developing an understanding. Every word is part of a bigger puzzle that your brain is trying to solve.
The role of writer is to show the reader what they are thinking through particular word choice.
Visualising is the process of understanding how the reader should visualise the text. Students need to understand that word choice is the driving force for what the author wants to reader to visualise when reading the text.
For example, if I state that my character is ‘running’, this will have a different interpretation to ‘running awkwardly’ or ‘running swiftly’.
The author is modifying the actions of the character, resulting the in reader developing a different interpretation.
Here is a great video that I found which explains visualising in a fantastic way!
Using the following questions stems, you can encourage students to use visualising who reading a text.
- What are you seeing in your mind right now?
- What do you think ____ looks like?
- What might it be like for the character to experience this environment?
- Imagine you are standing where the character is in this passage. What other things can you see that are not described in the text?
- Using the five senses, describe the experience of the character during this part of the text.
The English Classroom 