The act of composition is based on perception, selection, and arrangement in time and space of what is seen. How the world is seen depends on experience, memory, sensibility, discriminative powers, sexual identity, and cultural and historical contexts. Students can learn to understand how their personality affects what they see by maintaining private journals in which they learn to observe accurately, measure their perceptions, develop self-awareness, and build a bank of experiences from the natural data inherent in their lives. Visual literacy can improve verbal literacy and fluency; students can focus on an image in a slide or photograph, write about what they see, and in this way discover how reality can differ according to the perceiver and how choices can be made about what is seen and how it is seen. The teacher of writing and literature can use visual stimuli to heighten creative potential in students and revitalize the study of language and literature. (SRT)