Designing Static Visual Narratives as Prompts for Practising Creative Writing

Abstract

Language teachers are increasingly using image prompts in their composition classes, in keeping with the increasingly visual culture that learners are exposed to. However, there seem to be no specific guidelines or frameworks towards designing images for use as writing prompts, nor any reasoning as to why certain images might work best for this purpose. This paper tries to address this, and looks specifically at image prompts and how they are used by institutions and practitioners who try to teach creative writing. It builds on two earlier studies about images as narrative prompts, which are ‘Prompting Narratives: The Kaavad Tradition’ (IIC Quarterly Autumn, [7]) and ‘Eliciting stories: Exploring images as prompts’ (He Kupu J 3(5):92–100, [8]). Based on the above studies, as well as those of image prompts currently used in Indian schools, this paper suggests that static visual narratives are well-suited for use as prompts for practising narrative writing, and attempts to define a number of criteria that designers may want to keep in mind when trying to design image prompts for the writing classroom.