Readers Response #13

In the article, “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”, Anne Frances Wysocki questions the way that we see beauty and what deciphers beautiful from not beautiful. Wysocki believes the conflict to be the fact that we often link social views to our individual views. She explains the effect visual advertisements have on the eye.

I can relate Anne Frances Wysocki’s “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty” to Stephan Bernhardt “Seeing the Text” tremendously. Both authors focus on the way a text is presented and the effect that it has on its readers. They both introduce the idea that the visible features of written text have an impact on how students comprehend or understand what they are reading.

QD:

2. Wysocki sets up her article very different than most. She has various headers, bolded texts, underlined texts, highlighted texts, and often uses her own format when writing. I think the way she presents the article helps me, as a reader, feel more interested to what she is saying. As Bernhardt would explain it, this text is not a low-visual text. It has more characteristics as a visually informative text. Wysocki includes a variety in mood and syntactic patterning, emphasis controlled by visual stress of layout, type, size, spacing, and headings, and it is also localized; each section is its own locale with its own pattern of development by arresting reader’s attention.

3. The Peek advertisement does interest me a bit. It has a very scandalous and interesting look to it that would draw me in. I wouldn’t personally want to read a book including erotic and sexual photographs.

AE:

2. I believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think that beauty is determined universally, many people have many different opinions that vary by the person. Wysocki introduces the idea that beauty is something that we construct together but forced by social forces to think otherwise. I agree with Wysocki’s idea that if we build the qualities of beauty, then we can potentially see the beauty.

MM:

1. I believe that Wysocki’s statement, "There is no question that there is a certain necessity to effective visual composition because a design must fit a viewer's expectation if it is to make sense… but if design is to have any sense of possibility—of freedom—to it, then it must also push against the conventions, the horizon, of those expectations" (97), applies to her article because the readers have specific details draw them into a text. I believe it applies to many other visual arts because presentation has a lot to do with who will be interested in it.

I enjoyed reading “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty”. It is always refreshing to read an article that isn’t the same format as the rest. I think that it helped Wysocki’s argument and helped understand what she was trying to present a lot more with how she presented the text itself.