Art and design students employing aspects of the visual and metaphoric to structure and create meaning in writing. An insight from the MA dissertation-writing Intranet site at the Royal College of Art

The article seeks to show how an emphasis on the visual within the Intranet site MADD (Matters around Art and Design Dissertation) brings the dissertation process a little closer to the A&D students’ practice, and how the interplay between visual and verbal is part of an expressive idiom that is motivating and dynamic. The account is set within the context of the national writing project, ‘Writing Purposefully in Art and Design’ (Writing PAD) that is, ‘designed to promote the adoption of models of good practice that encourage inclusive approaches to the purposes and possibilities of writing’. After highlighting some significant characteristics of the Writing PAD case studies, the article will focus on the ‘English for Academic Purposes’ background and highlight approaches relevant to the construction of the MADD site. This will lead into a discussion of the uses of the visuals employed by the six students in the dissertations that they contributed to MADD. The article will end with implications for further developments.