But all texts have visual design elements. Even the five-paragraph essay produced on the manual typewriter could be more or less persuasive depending on margin width and line spacing. When students work on a publication, these visual concerns suddenly develop skeleton, muscle, and a formidable shape. Take, for example, the process of composing headlines. But headlines function in a sophisticated visual dimension unbeknownst to most students until they work with them in the publication context.
Headlines act much like concrete poetry, which relies heavily on the visual medium.
The headline can be manipulated visually in ways that the story cannot. In the technology classroom, students experience this first hand. In the process, they learn to synthesize and summarize their own writing and to construct concise language packaged to appeal to a reader. Another text-image whose visual placement matters is the pull quote, a short passage of about three to four lines printed in a large, bold font and boxed into the body of the main text. However, before the development of DTP technology, using pull quotes as a critical thinking and writing activity was cumbersome.