Part I: Exploration
1. Identify the issue or problem that you plan to focus on in your Inquiry Project. For my inquiry project, I am focusing on how people perceive television compared to reading text from a book. Can we interpret the same or more information from a movie (television) scene rather than the same scene from a book and vice versa.

2. What is your personal connection to and interest in this topic? I am a Interdisciplinary communications major, with a focus in graphic design. I am very interested on how visual media effects the reader compared to text. My ability to communicate to an audience through visual mediums is inherently compared to my understanding of the media. Therefore, I need to explore how people see a visual composition and react to it.

3. What opinions do you already hold about this topic? Currently, I believe that a person can gather more information about what a product is with a visual composition of that product rather than a textual composition of that product. If you take a still shot of a movie and analyze that scene the audience can infer more information about the current situation the character is going through. In order for the same effect to happen in text, the writer has to "set up" the scene by literally describing the scene to the reader.

4. What knowledge do you already have about this topic. What are your main questions about this topic? What are you most curious about? The knowledge I have about this topic is mostly from my own experience and from the research I have already done on this topic. I am most curious about researching the ambiguity that writers have about their work; in other words sometimes writers will not describe their scene to the reader because they want the audience to visualize the scene in their own mind. Does a visual (non-textual) scene ever do this? Is it impossible for this to happen in a visual scene? What is the effect on the audience? In order for the visual composition to work the reader has to "believe" in the layout of the scene. If the medium is too unusual or specific the audience might dismiss the credibility of the information. In literature if the reader is not given the visual concept of the scene it is the reader's obligation to visualize it himself. In doing this, does this idea of "audience participation" make the reader more "involved" in the textual medium.

6. How might composition theorists and researchers approach or study this topic? Does this approach differ from those of other related disciplines (such as communication studies)? Fortunately, I think this topic can be easily researched by analyzing readers ability to understand a scene in a movie or a scene in a book. The researcher might be able to give some sort of quiz about the scene they just watched or read to gauge the ability of the audience. It would also be interesting to see how age affects the results. I think it is a society induced idea that younger people tend to be visual learners because of the effect of television and computers.

7. How could you research this topic outside the library (for example, through interviews and/or observations)? I am probably going to put my family through a lot of tests. Watching scenes from movies then having them read text and see what they remember or liked better about each medium.

8. Write an initial claim, or an open-ended question, to guide your research on this topic. Make it specific but exploratory. Remember that a good claim opens up an area of inquiry about a topic; a claim should invite evidence, support, and debate. Time and time again, people always say after watching a block-buster movie that the book was better. I want to explore this idea. Why do people like to read J.R. Tolkien's books rather than watch the visually amazing movies? I want to explore reader engagement. I think that because people are actively engaged in a book as a third party character, makes it more entertaining than possibly watching the movie.