In his 1986 article, "Seeing the Text," Stephen Bernhardt urges college composition instructors to add visual cues to their toolbox of traditional rhetorical strategies for expository writing. Perhaps the single most significant point that Bernhardt makes is contained in his opening paragraph: written text is necessarily a visual medium of communication. Even the most traditional use of text---graphic representation of the spoken language---gives the reader a tremendous increase in access control of the information. As the number, variety, and quality of visual clues increase beyond the graphic representation of spoken language, accessibility of information also increases.
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