I am a visual learner. In order to truly grasp the meaning of any piece of writing, I must be able to image it. If my I am unable to produce a conceptual image, I’m lost. This fact has led me through my years of schooling to develop my own system for learning. Just as the Greek rhetoricians had their “memory mansions”, I have my own system of analogies; there are a plethora of real-world models I am able to use as my own memory mansions.

As I was reading the essay excepts of Kenneth Burke, I noticed that he used analogies at least once in each excerpt in order to elaborate on whatever points he was making. He advocates for the use of analogies both explicitly and implicitly. In A Grammar of Motives, he indicates that a visual thinker would be “a thinker who, instead of using a terminology that was merely slung together, [feels] the logical and aesthetic (and moral!) desire for an internal consistency among his terms” (p.128). This “internal consistency” leads one to imagine the given terminology in “scenic terms” rather than in mere dialogue. Burke’s implicit advocacy for analogies can be found in his own use of the model. On page 130 in Motives, he likens the complexities in the “nature of philosophy” to the “design for a perpetual motion machine.” One may easily imagine how a perpetual motion machine (i.e. a clock) would look inside. The complex structure of such a machine may not be understood in all aspects, but the overall message in this analogy is that “it becomes fantastically complex as the inventor finds that each new wheel or trip or pin or cam which he added to solve his problem gave rise to a new problem.” So it is in philosophy, with its “problems-atop-problems-atop-problems and problems-within-problems-within-problems.” In Language as Symbolic Action, page 45, the analogy of “terministic screens” and photographic color filters makes a concrete image of the differing interpretations that critics make about the same piece of rhetoric.

These useful analogies, for me, open up limitless doors of understanding on complex issues. This is why I would call this learning process my own memory mansion: I can take any given analogy and fit it into my mansion, with its hallways and bedrooms and furniture and endless corners. I can wander through the mansion in my mind and come across new discoveries about any given subject with which I was previously unfamiliar.

I know that there are several other types of learners, but I find myself having a bias towards those writers whose understanding of the visual is evident. As a writer, however, I wish to uncover the ways in which my writing can reach the auditory and kinesthetic learner.