While attempting to refine and redefine the composing process, rhetoric teachers have overlooked research showing how the brain's visual and verbal components interrelate. Recognition of the brain's visual potential can mean more than the use of media with the written word--it also has implications for the writing process itself. For example, outlining is a linear, left-hemispheric, and limiting activity that may not allow a student the kind of inventive richness of right hemispheric activities such as flow charts, arrows, boxes, parentheses, Venn diagrams, and story boards. Unfortunately, many students come to class visually inhibited. One step toward teaching students the value of visuals is to present them regularly with information in a two-dimensional form. Summarizing the data in a numerical table can be a useful exercise in abstracting information and can reveal one virtue of illustrations. Teachers should also take advantage of the similarities between the process of writing and the processes of drawing or painting. A full recognition of the brain's dual capacities not only could lead to an expanded view of composition as a visual and verbal skill but also could help to explain phenomena already recognized, such as invention and style being more right hemispheric, while arrangement may draw more on the orderly, logical left hemisphere. (HOD)