In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates’ struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are preparing to attend professional or graduate school. Although never intended to be a course devoted to academic writing, the struggles we uncovered made it apparent that without addressing these students’ writing difficulties, especially with argumentation, optimal learning was not achievable. For each form of writing central to the course (i.e., summaries, comparisons, and argumentation), we not only describe the challenges we have documented over the past six years, but also the instructional responses we instituted to counter those challenges. We conclude by sharing insights we have garnered from this experience that may serve others who are confronting similar issues in their students’ writing abilities.

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Static visuals have acted as a consistent form of communication across cultures and time. No classification system has been devised that encompasses the many types of static visuals used in multimodal research. Undertaken in two phases, the present investigation involved a systematic review of recent research involving pairings of static visuals with connected discourse (Phase 1).The findings of that review, combined with analysis of theoretical writings, were used to construct a corpus of terms for the range of visuals encountered in research and their salient features (Phase 2). The outcomes of this research have practical and theoretical significance by offering a critical analysis of recent studies with visual-text pairing and a lexicon for static visuals that is literature-based. Objective and PurposeFrom cave drawings, to the daily newspaper, and educational materials such as textbooks, static visuals have provided societies a means to communicate information distinct from or in complement to oral or written speech (Goodman, 1997;Holliday, 1990;Knox, 2007;Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996). Regardless of location, time period, and culture, visuals have consistently functioned as valuable information sources and have been used to adorn, illustrate, clarify, or elaborate texts. The symbiotic relation between visuals and text and the resulting effects on comprehension have been the focus of educational research for more than a half century (e.g.,