Louder than Words: A History of Wordless Storytelling
The name seems to say it all—it is a book without text where the story is told solely through the art. Images tell the stories and they must be read as carefully as any text. Artists are literally “writing with pictures,” as so aptly phrased by Uri Shulevitz. While similar pictorial choices are made when illustrating books with and without text, in a wordless book the art requires a more intense visual focus on communicating the narrative. Artists create characters personalities through pictures alone, using facial expressions and body language to convey what they may be thinking or feeling. Emotion is also shown through the context of the pictures. The size of an image affects how the reader responds to a character, as does the size of the character within the image, and lighting and color amplify the emotional mood.
The absence of words gives artists complete freedom to design the pages without having to leave space for blocks of text or word balloons. Pages can vary between single-page pictures, double-page spreads, or pages divided into multiple images. Multi-image pages can extend or compress time; a single page of many panels can show scenes across long periods of time, or they can expand a single short moment in incremental detail. The sequencing of the various page layouts creates a visually engaging reading experience. Borders and other design elements are used to visually guide readers through a story and can indicate shifts from reality to fantasy or differentiate between story spaces.
The most radical decision an artist makes is to not use words. When artists remove text, they invite readers to decode the pictures for themselves, so every child reads the book in their own unique way and according to their own personal life experiences and backgrounds. A wordless picture book asks children to collaborate in the storytelling process—a very empowering request.
Beginning in the mid-1960’s, wordless storytelling took hold in children’s publishing. Since that time picture books continue to be the most prolific and creative showcase for wordless stories. Although, with one exception, picture books were late to join the wordless genre.
Stories told only through pictures have been present throughout our history, as evidenced by cave paintings, Greek and Roman pottery, and stained glass windows. These works are often comprised of multiple images working together to tell their stories. In 11th century England there was the Bayeux Tapestry and in 12th century Japan there were Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (“Animal-person caricatures”), a set of four picture scrolls. Both these works present stories without text and that are read in one direction, showing a specific chronological order. Their images are in sequences that are not divided into individual segments or panels, but are composed in scenes that flow into each other. Wordless narratives are found in almost all art forms, from painting, printmaking, illustrated books, comics, and film—all forms that use images in sequence.
The English painter and printmaker William Hogarth may be the only example of both a wordless and sequential storyteller in fine art until the 20th century. In 1731 Hogarth created a series of six paintings called A Harlot’s Progress in which the pictures are read in sequence from left to right. The images are dense with detail and must be examined closely to absorb all the nuances of the tale as the characters react to each other and to their surroundings. Hogarth, a skilled engraver, created sets of prints of his paintings to sell. The prints were so popular that he may have invented another concept—the sequel. A Rake’s Progress followed in 1733 and the two sets of prints were so successful that new copyright laws were created to combat the host of knockoffs that hit the market.
In the 1800’s, several new visual narrative mediums developed that explored their forms without words. In Japan, a new form of sequential picture making called Manga (“impromptu drawing”) appeared from artists such as Santo Kyoden, Aikawa Minwa, and Katsushika Hokusai. Swiss teacher and author Rodolphe Topffer published “picture stories” that put words and pictures into sequential panels. Topffer’s stories paved the way for the modern comic strip. In the 1870s and 1880s, Randolph Caldecott in England coined the phrase “picture books” to describe the children’s books he created. He was the first to put pictures on every page, and made the images as integral to the story as the text. And motion pictures were invented.
Initially movies were silent, not by choice, but because the technology had not been invented to include sound. They were not really silent either, as musical accompaniment was a part of the movie-viewing experience. And they were not strictly wordless, as directors used title cards to convey some of the dialogue. However, the main way the stories were conveyed was through visual imagery, and through the most radical part of filmmaking, editing. The juxtaposition of one shot in a film—or one picture in a book—next to another creates a narrative. The viewer or reader must mentally make the connection between the two. Editing is the essence of visual storytelling whether on screen or in a book.
The limitation of working without recorded sound became the early movies’ greatest attribute. Filmmakers like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton found extraordinary ways to tell stories visually. There are many, like Chaplin, who believed that the 1910’s and 1920’s produced the most visually inventive films ever made.
Movies had a dramatic effect on many graphic artists who sought to capture on the page the movement and excitement of motion pictures. Nobel laureate author Thomas Mann claimed that Passionate Journey was the movie that impressed him the most. Yet Passionate Journey was not a movie; rather, it was a wordless novel published in 1919 by Belgian artist Frans Masereel. Masereel was a political cartoonist and printmaker who worked in a bold, expressionist style that lent itself perfectly to the woodcut prints he made to comment on social issues like the First World War and the industrialization of society. He decided to tell stories using his prints, in the form of books. And, in a stroke of genius, he chose not to include any text. Passionate Journey and Masereel’s other wordless books essentially birthed the genre of what we now call the graphic novel. In his lifetime, he published over fifty wordless books.
Masereel inspired other artists to create their own wordless novels. In the late 1920s and early 30s, Otto Knuckel, Helena Bochorakova-Dittrichova, Giacomo Patri, and Lynd Ward all produced wordless books with woodcuts after seeing Masereel’s. In 1934 the German painter Max Ernst collaged illustrations from pulp novels and encyclopedias to create the surrealist wordless novel Un Semaine du Bonte. American Lynd Ward became the most well-known maker of wordless woodcut novels in the United States. His first publication, God’s Man (1929), was a success and he produced five more wordless novels over the next eight years.
Several comic strip artists also made the leap into book length narrative via the wordless novel, using pen, brush, and ink rather than woodcut. William Gropper published Alay-oop in 1930 and Milt Gross lampooned the wordless novel genre with He Done Her Wrong, also in 1930. Myron Waldman, an animator for Max Fleischer’s studios, published his wordless novel Eve in 1943.
Other artists stayed within the world of newspaper comics to produce wordless stories, although there are only a few examples. The most imaginative of these strips was Polly and Her Pals by Cliff Sterrett, which debuted in 1912. In the first half of the 20th century, Sunday comics such as Little Nemo, Krazy Kat, and Gasoline Alley took up an entire page of a newspaper, a remarkable showcase for their art. Like the others, Polly and Her Pals had a “topper” strip, which was a separate, shorter story that ran above the main comic. Sterrett’s top strip, Dot and Dash, about a pair of dogs, was always wordless. The rest of the page featured the adventures of Polly, which was regularly wordless. Sterrett used elements of cubism and surrealism, making his comic strip one of the most visually exciting. The other wordless strips were Otto Soglow’s The Little King, premiering in 1934, and Carl Thomas Anderson’s Henry, which began in 1932.
All this wordless activity did not last. Sound entered movies in the late 1920’s and after the release and huge success of the “talkie” The Jazz Singer in 1927 there was no turning back. By 1930 almost all films included sound, although purist Charlie Chaplin held out until 1936 when he released his last silent film, Modern Times. Over the years there has been the occasional film made without dialogue, like The Thief in 1952, staring Ray Milland; Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon in 1956; Chantal Ackerman’s Hotel Monterey in 1973; Michael Hazanavicius’s The Artist in 2011; and The Red Turtle, by Michael Dudok de Witt in 2016. But these are anomalies measured against the vast numbers of movies released each year.
After their heyday in the early 1930s and early 40s, wordless graphic novels were produced only occasionally. While there were notable works by Laurence Hyde (Southern Cross), Eric Drooker (Flood! and Blood Song), Peter Kuper (The System), Jim Woodring (The Frank Book), and others, they are small in number within the graphic novel genre.
In newspaper comic strips, Polly and Her Pals, The Little King, and Henry remained the only wordless examples up until they ceased publication, Polly in 1958 and the other two in the 1970s. Henry expanded into comic book form in the 1940s and dialogue was added, although the daily strip remained silent. There are scant few examples of wordless stories in the world of superhero comic books.
This brings us to picture books. The 1930’s were, to quote historian Leonard Marcus, “when the American picture book came of age.” (I highly recommend Marcus’ essay for The Carle’s 2019 exhibition Out of the Box: The Graphic Novel Comes of Age, which dovetails with much of this essay). In 1931 Helen Sewall’s picture book, A Head for Happy, was published. It is not a wordless book, but it’s close. The text is minimal and many of its 64 pages are without words, including several double-page spreads. There is just enough text though that I don’t categorize it as a wordless book.
In 1932 Macmillan published What Whiskers Did, a picture book by author and artist Ruth Carroll. Drawn in black crayon, it tells the story of Whiskers, a Scottish terrier that gets loose from a young girl and runs into the woods. There the dog encounters a rabbit and then a fox. Fleeing the fox, Whiskers and the rabbit escape down a rabbit hole.
These scenes are rendered realistically, but in echoes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the trip through the rabbit hole changes the story from realism to fantasy as the animals become anthropomorphized. Whiskers dines at a table with the rabbit family and uses utensils. They play games, including blind man’s bluff. When it is time for Whiskers to leave, he bids the rabbits goodbye and returns to the little girl, who is thankful her dog has come home. This is the first completely wordless picture book published in the United States. Incredibly, it will be thirty years before there is another. That gap is still a mystery but, in contrast to comics, graphic novels, and film, once children’s publishers began producing more wordless picture books, they became the art form where wordless storytelling flourished like no other.
What Whiskers Did appeared the same year as Lynd Ward’s wordless novel Wild Pilgrimage, the comic strip Henry launched in newspapers, and a year after Chaplin’s silent film, City Lights. Why did Ruth Carroll choose to make her book wordless? Was she inspired by the wordless stories in those other mediums? Louise Bechtel was editor of Macmillan’s children’s book department at the time and had published A Head for Happy a year before. She was an innovative and forward-thinking editor. Did she influence Carroll’s decision? Did she and/or Carroll look at A Head for Happy and think, “well, why use any text at all?” I haven’t yet found any research to shed light on the genesis of Whiskers, but given the amount of other wordless material in print at that time, it isn’t surprising there would be a wordless picture book too. The question is not why was there a wordless picture in 1932, but why, and for so long, was there only one?
My own first introduction to wordless stories came from a Giant Golden Book my family owned, The Provensen Animal Book, published in 1952. It contains a wide range of material, from poems and short stories to visual puzzles. On one double-page spread the Provensens present three “stories without words.” They are very simple, only three to six panels each, but I can vividly recall how captivated I was by these little vignettes.
In 1954, Max, by Pericle Luigi Giovannetti, was published. Giovannetti was a painter and illustrator who drew cartoons for the British satirical magazine Punch, where he created the character of Max, a marmot that engages in pantomime slapstick adventures. Macmillan compiled and published many of those drawings in book form in the U.S. Max was also published by others around the world. There is no through-line narrative; the book is essentially a collection of stand-alone cartoons that appeal to all ages. Other Max books followed in the next few years.
In 1960 Alfred A. Knopf published I Am Andy, by Charlotte Steiner. It was marketed as a “You-Tell-A-Story Book.” Each double-page spread contains five or six vignettes, or panels, showing Andy involved in a particular activity. A preamble states, “You can tell the stories in your own words.” It’s too bad that each spread has a title such as Andy Plays the Trumpet and Andy and the Cat. Those titles are a bit of a deal breaker for me.
There are no wordless picture books in 1961, but in 1962 Tomi Ungerer came out with Snail, Where Are You? This is a wonderful book made by a great artist who had already made great picture books with text. Snail is conceptually simple and elegant, with beautiful and witty drawings that incorporate the spiral of a snail shell into each picture. That’s it. Ungerer allows readers to see the relationship between shapes and objects. It is a book that asks us to look closely at the pictures and at the world around us. There is a line of text at the end, “Snail, where are you?” that is answered on the last page by the snail, “I am here.” That text is a funny little ending, but is in no way integral to what the pictures have done in the previous pages. To me, Ungerer’s book marks the date when wordless picture books begin to really take off.
While in 1963 three more wordless books are published, it was the release of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are that is perhaps more notable when it comes to wordless storytelling. Although not wordless, the book contains three consecutive wordless double-page spreads that encompass the Wild Rumpus and that exposed millions of readers to the idea of “wordlessness.” There are two more wordless picture books in 1964, including another by Tomi Ungerer, One, Two, Where’s My Shoe?
There is one wordless picture book in 1965—What Whiskers Did. Yes, Ruth Carroll’s book again! Thirty-three years after the first edition, Carroll completely re-illustrated the book. Instead of the original Scottish terrier, it now stars a poodle and contains a single brown color overlaid on the drawings. I’m again curious about Carroll’s motivation. There were only a few other examples of wordless picture books, so why did she and the publisher think the world was ready for a second version of Whiskers? Perhaps they were right, since two years later Scholastic released a paperback edition of Whiskers and Carroll would publish five more wordless books in the late 1960s and 70s.
The year 1966 saw one wordless book, but in 1967 there were six. In 1968 there are again six, and in 1969 there are fourteen. From there the numbers continue to rise to a peak of 67 books in 1986 before trending back down to twelve in 1991. Despite the dropping numbers, wordless picture books continued to be published thereafter, some to great popularity and others to great acclaim (and sometimes both), winning major prizes in the field.
As the numbers of wordless picture books began to rise, many were one-time explorations by their author/artists. For others, the idea of text-free stories was something that resonated deeply and they created wordless books as a major part of their careers. Beginning in the late 1960s and early 70s, that latter group includes author/artists such as Mercer Mayer, with his popular Boy, Dog, and Frog series; Mitsumasa Anno and his remarkable Journey books; Fernando Krahn, who made over 20 very funny wordless books; and Tana Hoban, a photographer who created dozens of beautiful concept books that invite readers to look intensely at the world around them.
In 1968 John S. Goodall created the first of many wordless picture books with The Adventures of Paddy Pork (which won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award). Paddy Pork is a “moveable book,” a book that utilizes pull-tabs, flaps, and other interactives. Most of Goodall’s books contain an extra half page, or flap, in the middle of each double-page spread. When the book is open with the flap laying flat on the right-hand side, the reader sees a full double-page image. When the reader turns the flap, it reveals the same scene but with the characters in different positions. The flap acts as a form of animation, adding the element of time to the story.
Lynd Ward, one of the founding fathers of adult wordless novels, also had a long career in children’s books, winning the 1953 Caldecott Medal for The Biggest Bear, a book he also wrote. In 1973, at the end of his career, he finally created a wordless picture book for children, The Silver Pony. In contrast to the woodcuts he used for his adult wordless novels, for The Silver Pony, Ward painted the pictures in black and shades of gray.
In 1978 Peter Spier was awarded the Caldecott Medal for Noah’s Ark, the first wordless book to win the medal. Spier created several other wordless books, including Rain (1982), a book that, like Noah’s Ark, uses a wide range of page designs: full-page images, double-page spreads, and pages divided into multiple panels. The effect creates a wonderfully varied reading experience and is anything but static.
Raymond Briggs took a similar approach to page design in The Snowman, published in 1978. The Snowman is one of the best-known wordless picture books, helped in part by its popular 30-minute animated film adaptation released in 1982. Briggs’ design of The Snowman served as inspiration for artist Shaun Tan when he created his epic wordless book, The Arrival (2007). Like Briggs and Spier before him, Tan uses multi-panel designs to tell his story, although he goes much farther. Some pages have four or five panels, while others have as many as sixty. With so many panels Tan shows complex actions in great detail.
Year after year picture books artists continued to be drawn to wordless storytelling. Peter Spier moved back and forth between books with text and books without, as have many other artists including Emily Arnold McCully, Tomie dePaola, Jeannie Baker, Peter Sis, Suzy Lee, and myself. Most, but not all, of Arthur Geisert’s books are wordless. Barbara Lehman and Aaron Becker work exclusively in the wordless realm.
In innovative, yet unique ways, Jorg Muller, Istvan Banyai, and Laetitia Devernay expanded the definition of design in their wordless books. Donald Crews and Christian Robinson use flat graphic images, while Eric Rohmann and Marla Frazee illustrate rich and lush images. Molly Bang creates mystery through the use of positive and negative spaces, and Raul Colon changes his artistic style to move in and out of fantasy. Issa Watanabe and Henry Cole have made intensely emotional wordless books, while JiHyeon Lee’s and Stephen Savage’s books are whimsical and funny. Molly Idle continues John S. Goodall’s tradition of moveable wordless books with her ingenious use of flaps in Flora and the Flamingo (2013).
I’ve focused mainly on publishing in the United States, but wordless picture books are a global phenomenon. Referred to as silent books in some other parts of the world, they are extraordinary and deserve an exhibition of their own. A great resource for these books can be found on the website of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).
There is so much more to explore regarding wordless picture books: the role of editors in the decision to take a wordless approach to a story; the reluctance of many adults to buy wordless picture books for fear of not knowing how to read them to their children; the fascinating research showing how wordless picture books generate expansive use of vocabulary during parent child reading; and the inspiring ways teachers use wordless picture books to release the imaginations of all students, and to help those struggling with English as a second language, dyslexia, and other learning issues.
For now, let’s just focus on the art. What we see in this exhibition is how artists have created remarkable visual reading experiences. By making the decision to remove words, the artists pare their books down to the essence of their art—the pictures—and leave those pictures open to interpretation. In doing so the artists invite children to make the stories their own.


Dark rides have been entertaining visitors since the beginning of the 20th century. Back then however, the concept of the ‘dark ride’ as we know it today was hardly developed. In fact, the first rides appearing all over the world that we would now call ‘dark rides’ were more like pioneering prototypes. The years around 1900 saw a wide range of technological developments, which in combination with the emergence of large-scale public entertainment led to the invention of various amusement rides. The world’s first dark rides were just a small part of this wide ongoing chain of inventions, where different inventions built upon one another to create the world’s first dark rides.
To understand the origin of this chain of inventions and developments, we need to go even further back in time. Already in the 18th century, two types of entertainment existed which included elements that would later be essential for the experience of the dark ride. One of these experiences was the Panorama: a large painting created on the inside of a cylindrical platform, giving visitors standing in the middle of the cylinder a 360° view of a specific site. In their nature, panoramas were the first experiences meant to immerse visitors into another world. This concept is still one of the basic elements of a dark ride, which intent to immerse visitors into a controlled environment and transport them to another place and/or time.
The second type of 18th century entertainment that could be regarded as a predecessor of the dark ride is the phantasmagoria or ‘ghost show’. These shows appeared on traveling fairgrounds, using the technique of the magic lantern (a primitive type of projector) to create a frightful and supernatural experience inside a dark indoor environment. “The phantasmagoria was a dynamic and exciting media format, in which the audience wasn’t moved physically but images were scaled and moved around them to great vertiginous effect” (Zika, 2021, p.56). Over time, the advent of electricity afforded safe and more controllable ways of illuminating such indoor experiences. The control over illumination and the atmosphere created by artificial light is one of the key elements that allowed for the development of the dark ride, and still is a major part in dark ride design.
The first inventions leading to the world’s first dark rides would emerge by the end of the 19th century, partly based on the panoramas and phantasmagorias that already existed. The era in which the dark ride emerged was characterised by a major change in public entertainment in general, as large centralised entertainment venues started to appear from the second half of the 19th century. This was the era of urbanisation, when more and more people came to live in cities that soon became crowded. In these densely populated places, the idea of a park as a recreational place to step out of the busy city life gained popularity. This applied not only to traditional urban parks which were constructed in these years, with New York’s Central Park (1871) as major example, but also for venues including a higher degree of entertainment. With the large amount of people living in one single place, the potential market for entertainment sparked new, and larger, types of entertainment venues. Eventually, these were the locations where the first dark rides would emerge.
Before the rise of the first amusement parks, the most extravagant public entertainment areas were the World’s Fairs. Starting with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, world fairs were held over irregular intervals in cities throughout the world. These fairs provided a showcase for state-of-the-art technologies and inventions from around the globe, drawing millions of visitors to their grounds for both education and entertainment. Especially interesting for the development of the amusement industry was the Chicago World’s Fair (also named Columbian Exposition) in 1893, which became known as the first expo to separate the area of amusement from the exhibition halls. The term ‘Midway’ was introduced for this area, which included several shows and rides, among them the world’s very first Ferris wheel. For future World’s Fairs, this idea of a midway remained (such as the San Francisco fair in 1894, launching the world’s first Haunted Swing) and the word Midway is commonplace in the amusement industry up to this day.
The rise of the Amusement Park
Though highly popular, these world fairs were expensive undertakings, requiring a major investment for a venue that only lasted one operating season. The success of these fairs inevitably sparked the rise of the amusement park as a permanent location to house similar attractions, with the midway of Chicago’s fair becoming the last step towards the creation of the first real amusement parks. The best-known examples of newly emerging amusement parks are Blackpool Pleasure Beach (U.K., 1896) and the series of amusement parks at Coney Island, New York (U.S.A., from 1895). Especially in the U.S.A., establishments similar to the widely popular parks at Coney Island were imitated in various locations to offer the newest kind of entertainment for visitors across the country.
In some cases, especially in Europe, amusement parks continued on the already existing venues: historical ‘pleasure gardens’, parks packed with entertainment that were generally found in European capitals, went along in the rise of the new phenomenon of the amusement park. Places like Prater (Vienna, Austria) and Tivoli Gardens (Copenhagen, Denmark) started adding amusement rides to their grounds, thus becoming true amusement parks as we would define them today.
The world’s first ‘dark ride’
The concept of the dark ride as we know today however, in all its complexity, did not pop up at once. It took a few steps by eager inventors to bring the first true dark ride to life. This process, in which inventions followed each other quickly, happened around 1900, along with the rapid development in the amusement industry in general.
The limits of technology
In those days however, technology was a major limiting factor in offering experiences that would eventually be called a dark ride. Already in the 1880’s, amusement rides emerged that offered a dark experience by driving a train through a mysterious tunnel. These cave train rides did not differ that much from regular trains, which in those days were driven by steam locomotives. The combination of a steam engine and an indoor ride was not a very convenient one, and it was not until the rise of the electrical engine that such experiences seriously took flight. The first electric motors enabled such trains to be propelled by clean electrical power, without filling the indoor sections with smoke. The technique of these engines however was not yet as advanced to be utilised for individual vehicles. This meant that a dark ride experience as we often see nowadays, with individual vehicles transporting a few people at a time through a building offering a degree of intimacy and mystery, was still out of reach.
An alternative way to drive individual vehicles along a specified route was invented in 1891, when Arthur Pickard patented the invention of the ‘serpentine sluiceway’. Pickard operated his invention as an outdoor amusement ride in London. He did not use a track system, which required an engine for each vehicle: instead, he constructed a canal and invented a way to propel the water flow, which would take individual boats along the entire ride. The patent shows that the invention enabled a single engine to propel the water and create a continuous flow throughout the canal. This sluiceway was the first installation that could offer an individual experience for riders of a single vehicle, though Pickard only used the installation as an outdoor boat ride.
Coney Island’s ‘dark ride’
The ride by Arthur Pickard caught the attention of Paul Boyton, a showman at Coney Island, New York. Coney Island might be described as the birthplace of the amusement park: its seaside environment and good train connections to the city functioned as a major draw for visitors from the rapidly growing city of New York. The first amusement rides had emerged here since the 1870s, but the heydays of Coney Island were the years around 1900, when new developments and exciting rides were emerging every year to thrill the visitors. This started when Paul Boyton opened Sea Lion Park in 1895. Instead of operating some rides and charging admission for each of them, he fenced off his terrain and started charging an admission fee for the grounds. His park was a great success, with his famous shoot-the-chute-ride as major draw. However, the tumultuous economy at Coney Island rapidly saw the addition of a competing fenced-off park: In 1897, entrepreneur George Tilyou opened Steeplechase Park. The fierce competition brought Boyton in trouble: eventually, Sea Lion Park, the spark of the heydays of Coney Island, would only exist from 1895 to 1902.
In its brief existence however, the park saw the introduction of the first indoor boat ride, inspired by Pickard’s invention. Instead of a quiet outdoor boat ride, like the original, Boyton built his installation indoors. This added a completely new element to the ride: pitch darkness. The ride was literally the first dark ride in the world. Riders were taken through a dark passage in two-passenger boats, which created an intimate atmosphere. The ride quickly became popular with young couples: in a time when physical contact between boys and girls was considered highly inappropriate, the ride offered a way to cling to one another in a public location without being seen. The name of this ride at Sea Lion Park is not known, but thanks to the nature of the ride it sparked the name Tunnel of Love for these kinds of attractions. The name is still used for old-fashioned scenic boat dark rides, which would quickly start to emerge based on the popular installation at Coney Island.
The Austrian cave ride
While the first dark rides emerged in America as boat rides, elsewhere in the world other inventions also led to the emergence of a specific type of dark ride. In Austria, a showman called Hugo Pilz continued on the idea of the cave train rides, and developed such a ride with an electrical powered train that took riders along scenic parts. In other words: he created (probably) the world’s first dark ride, considering the DRdb-definition that a dark ride should include scenes.
The location of his ride was Prater in the Austrian capital Vienna, one of the old ‘pleasure gardens’ which has been opened since 1766. Just like in Coney Island, the turn-of-the-century era was a heyday for Prater. In 1897 the Giant Vienna Wheel opened, inspired by the Ferris Wheel at the Chicago World’s Fair and currently the oldest existing Ferris wheel in the world.
Only one year after the opening of the wheel, in 1898, showman Hugo Pilz opened his brand new ride: Grottenbahn ‘Zum Walfisch’. The ride was built adjacent to Pilz’ restaurant Zum Walfisch (At the Whale), and consisted of a train riding through grottoes depicting different themes. The word ‘grottenbahn’ could be translated as ‘cave railway’, obviously referring to the cave-like setting in which the scenes (or grottoes) were presented. With its opening year in 1898, Grottenbahn ‘Zum Walfisch’ is probably the earliest true dark ride in the world, though sources on the actual opening dates of these historic rides often contradict one another. The ride consisted of a 600 metre long track, where electrically powered trains passed through 18 grottoes. These themed grottoes included depictions of the North Pole, the ‘witch kitchen’ and the ‘electrical wondercave’. Apart from the ride through the grottoes, a major draw of the attraction was its magnificent concert organ, playing excerpts from opera as supporting music along the ride. Reports from those days speak of many people, sometimes a hundred at a time, gathering around the ride to listen to the wonderful organ music.
Inspired by the Grottenbahn
The popularity of the Grottenbahn did not go unnoticed for the other showmen around the Prater grounds. One year after the opening of Pilz’ ride, the showmen Ludwig and Karl Pretscher opened their Grottenbahn ‘Zum Lindwurm’ (referring to a dragon-like creature from German mythology). This ride was rethemed in 1907, but unfortunately burned down in a major fire during the Vienna offensive in 1945. As for the Grottenbahn ‘Zum Walfisch’, no sources confirm that the ride has been demolished, rethemed or rebuilt anytime since 1898. The currently existing ‘Alt Wiener Grottenbahn’ is mentioned to be the park’s oldest Grottenbahn, which means it is probably the same ride as Hugo Pilz opened over a century ago. Unfortunately no clear confirmation is given, not even by the park itself, that this existing ride is indeed over 100 years old, leaving the fate of the original Grottenbahn ‘Zum Wahlfisch’ a mystery.
The influence of the Grottenbahn stretched even beyond Prater. Another installation opened in Linz, also in Austria. This ride, called Turmbahn am Pöstlingberg (Tower railway at Pöstling Hill), opened in 1906. It was located inside one of the defence towers of Fort Pöstlingsberg, a disused fortress on top of a hill a few kilometres from the city centre. It is unknown whether the ride included scenes, but we do know that a ride with the Turmbahn consisted of four laps: during the first three laps, the cave was lit in different colours for each lap. The most exciting part was the last lap, which took place in pitch darkness… almost pitch darkness, that is, since some light shone from a sign saying ‘no kissing’. Just like in Coney Island, where the darkness was an attraction on its own, informal contact between boys and girls was undesirable in Austria in those days. The Turmbahn saw the same fate as Grottenbahn ‘Zum Lindwurm‘, being destroyed in 1945 after a bombing. Since 1948, guests can enjoy a new grottenbahn at the top of Pöstling Hill, which is still operational and depicts scenes from fairy tales.
An immersive trip to the moon
Back on the American side of the Atlantic, a one-of-a-kind experience appeared. In those days, the primitive dark rides mainly consisted of slow rides along scenes: entertaining, but not yet as immersive as we know the dark rides nowadays. However, in 1901, two men pioneered a ride that would be ground-breaking thanks to its immersive approach. These two men were Frederic Thompson and Elmer ‘Skip’ Dundy. Thompson was the creative mind of the two: trained as an architect, he ended up at the 1893 Chicago World Fair working several jobs. From there, he got into the business of expositions and entertainment, presenting the moving diorama ‘Darkness and Dawn’ at the 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha. Though already highly spectacular, that attraction was nothing close to his eventual masterpiece.
Dundy, on the other hand, was a showman with a feeling for business. He was well-educated and had great aptitude for financial matters, but his love for show business drove him into expositions as well. He created and ran two attractions for the 1898 expo In Omaha, but these turned out to be less popular than the other rides, especially the ‘Darkness and Dawn’-installation by Thompson. For the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, Dundy proposed his pirated version of Darkness and Dawn, using his business skills to outmanoeuvre Thompson. Eventually, Thompson and Dundy struck a deal for the 1901 expo, becoming business partners and sharing the profits of the four rides they ran together.
World’s first narrative-based amusement ride
Three out of these four rides would be similar to rides that either of the two had already presented at previous fairs, among them a version of Darkness and Dawn. The fourth ride was called A Trip to the Moon, and this was a truly special one. Thompson wanted to provide the visitors of his ride with an escape from everyday life, and was inspired by Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and by HG Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. He took a narrative approach like showmen had taken before, creating the idea to let the visitors board an airship and fly all the way to the moon. In those days, when flying already seemed like science-fiction to the people, the experience of a flight to the moon was nothing less than mind-blowing.
Thompson used a combination of mechanical effects, electric lights and projections to create an experience that no-one had ever seen before. He based his ride on the old technique of the panorama, the immersive paintings that were designed to completely surround the public. But instead of letting people watch the panorama at their own pace, Thompson designed a ride vehicle in the middle of the room. This ‘airship’, which was called Luna, was suspended from the ceiling by a few central steel cables, permitting the ship to rock and swing lightly. Riders would enter the immense room over a ramp, leading to the ride vehicle that was floating in the space. The vessel had the shape of a row boat, but was equipped with large wings at the place where oars would regularly have been, just below where the riders sat.
Once riders took their seats, with a maximum of 30 per ride, the panorama surrounding the vessel would come to life: it was a giant cyclorama, operating as a gigantic scroll passing around the riders. In combination with the movement of the cyclorama, fans would create wind and the vessel would start to shake and heave, creating a convincing feeling of movement. As the scroll went by, people would initially see Niagara Falls, then the city of Buffalo seen from the sky, and eventually the earth’s surface, as if they had truly taken off for a flight in outer space. Moreover, Thompson installed a series of stereopticons both above and below the visitors, out of sight thanks to the ship’s large wings. Stereopticons were projectors that were able to fade between projected images, which allowed Thompson to project clouds as if they were gliding past. All stereopticons together allowed for a 360° projection on the panorama, which Thompson used in combination with light effects for the creation of, for example, a thunderstorm. Eventually, riders would reach the moon, leave the vessel and walk into a lunar cavern made out of plaster, where employees dressed like inhabitants of the moon (which Thompson called Selenites) sold souvenirs and special food. From here, riders would enter the palace of the Man in the Moon for a final dance show, and eventually leave the experience.
A Trip to the Moon was completely different from other experiences in these days, by way of its focus on conjuring up very specific atmospheric illusions. Thompson used a range of techniques, all of which were already known, and deployed them in such a way that they created new spectacles. Combining these illusions enabled Thompson to create a convincing experience of a trip to the moon, an approach that no other showman had taken at that point. Technically speaking, A Trip to the Moon is not exactly a dark ride. In fact, it is a show ride: it is the world’s first motion simulator, in some way the predecessor of the immersive tunnel. But the way in which the combination of scenery, effects and a moving vehicle was used to create a coherent narrative-based experience also characterises the experience of a dark ride. That is why A Trip to the Moon can definitely be regarded as a major step in the development of the first dark rides in the world.
The success of Thompson and Dundy
A Trip to the Moon was a ride of a scale that had never been seen before. Thompson and Dundy spent a staggering $84.000 to build the ride, over $2M in today’s money. Riders were eager to pay $0,50 (around $16 nowadays) to experience the flight to the moon themselves, twice the price of other rides at the expo. The ride required 20 employees to operate and another 200 actors for the show and to play the Selenites. Despite the large investment and operational costs, the ride was very profitable, partly thanks to the merchandise sold in the moon cavern. A Trip to the Moon was not only the first truly immersive amusement ride, it also paved the way for merchandising in amusement parks. Dundy’s feeling for business clearly did not let him down on this occasion.
The success of A Trip to the Moon did not go unnoticed for George Tilyou, the entrepreneur who opened Steeplechase Park at Coney Island. In his fierce competition with Sea Lion Park, he was always looking for new experiences to draw visitors. Tilyou invited Thompson and Dundy to transport their attraction to his park, enabling them to continue the profitable operation of the ride after the fair had ended. A few changes were made: the aerial views of Buffalo were replaced with Manhattan and the vessel was adapted to allow for higher capacity, after which it was renamed ‘Luna III’. The ride operated in Steeplechase Park during 1902, but the duo were unhappy with the amount of profit they had to share with Tilyou. Thompson and Dundy planned to move the ride away after the season and bought the plot of Sea Lion Park from Paul Boyton, constructing a brand new park on the site and moving A Trip to the Moon to the new location for the 1903 season. They decided to name the park after their spaceship: ‘Luna Park’. Many parks throughout history have been named after this famous amusement park, which indirectly means that the world’s very first narrative-based ride is still honoured in amusement park names around the globe. After the death of Dundy in 1907, Thompson filed for bankruptcy in 1912 and was forced to hand over Luna Park to his creditors. It is not known whether A Trip to the Moon was still operational during this time. Nevertheless, the ride made history since it was ground-breaking in its scale, immersiveness and commercial exploitation, which would not be seen again to this extent for more than fifty years.
The scenic boat ride
The location where A Trip to the Moon spent its last years was the same as the location of the world’s first ‘dark ride’, as was mentioned earlier. This Tunnel of Love already proved a success, but it was not until such rides were extended with scenes that the dark boat ride truly took off. The ride type that emerged, which would be called Tunnel of Love, Old Mill or River Caves, was the first type of dark ride that spread around the globe. From a one-of-a-kind spectacle, the dark ride was rapidly evolving into a format. This created room for parks to adapt the dark ride to their own purpose and tailor them to their own public, starting an “evolution of different styles of the ride” as Joel Zika (2021) calls it.
The Old Mill
The first adaption of the Tunnel of Love opened in the same year as A Trip to the Moon in Kennywood, recently opened amusement park just outside Pittsburgh, PA. Just like Coney Island, Kennywood is a so-called ‘trolley park’: a park located at the end of a tramway which allowed easy access for people from the nearby city. Kennywood opened in 1899 and rapidly expanded by adding amusement rides, The Old Mill being the first major ride in 1901 (their first roller coaster would open just one year later).
The design of the Old Mill took the ride system from the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island. For creating the water current in the canal, Kennywood’s Old Mill used a large paddle wheel, an idea inspired by the many water mills that could be found in the area in which the park is located. Continuing on the concept of the water mill, the park built the whole ride building as if it was a dilapidated sawmill. Moreover, the boats were originally shaped like logs, representing the actual logs transported over the river towards the real sawmills just around the corner. The idea of shaping boats after floating logs seems obvious nowadays, but in 1901 the creation of a coherent narrative which explained the looks of the ride system (paddle wheel), vehicles (logs) and show building (old mill) was truly unique. Moreover, the park derived the idea of the theme from its own surroundings, an example of a tailor-made version of the ride created to suit the public and the city where it was located. This way of thinking was yet another step towards creating immersively themed rides, where every part of the ride is meant to contribute to a coherent story.
Little is known about the exact interior of the Old Mill in its very first operating years. Reports state that the ride featured “gorgeous grottoes or musical caves”, all of which were lit by state-of-the-art electric lights. The ride consisted probably of both indoor and outdoor sections, leading around and through the Old Mill building. Ever since first opening, the ride has seen no less than 11 rethemes, of which the first occurred just five years into operation. Apart from rethemes, the ride suffered from a major fire in 1911. The continuous development of the ride makes it hard to trace back the original components and those that were added later. In the beginning of the 1920s, the ride lost one of its key storytelling elements when new boats were installed that were no longer log-themed (as shown in the picture). Regardless of all changes, the ride is still operational today: better still, Kennywood recently rethemed the ride once more to honour the original Old Mill. This latest version, logically called The Old Mill, has been entertaining visitors since 2020.
Boat ride to Hell
The scenic boat ride soon developed into a format which parks adapted for their own public, and it would not take too long before an installation opened at Coney Island. This ‘Hell Gate’ was one of the most notorious installations of a scenic boat ride. The ride could be found in Dreamland, the third amusement park at Coney Island (beside Steeplechase Park and Luna Park) that opened in 1904. Hell Gate was the star attraction of Dreamland’s second season, opening in 1905. The ride constituted a large investment and was the ultimate effort to one-up Luna Park and its immersive experiences.
Visitors of Dreamland could hardly miss Hell Gate, a large building topped by none other than Satan himself looming over the park. Underneath the statue, a large open room showed the first section of the ride. Guests could watch riders boarding open boats and then descending along an ever-narrowing 20-metre whirlpool swirling toward the centre. The contents of the rest of the ride have been well-described by Theodore Waters in the July 8, 1905 issue of Harper’s Weekly: “The ‘pool’ is merely a spiral trough made of wood and iron, through which the water carries the boats to the centre, where the slope suddenly dips and allows them to slip beneath the outer rims of the spiral into a subterranean channel which follows a tortuous course under the building. There are scenes… intended to corroborate the popular conception of the Earth’s interior. […] By the time the spectators above are beginning to wonder what has happened to the boat, the passengers have had a surfeit of subterranean horrors, and are shot up through one side of the pool to the surface.”
Hell Gate stands out not only for its crowd-drawing whirlpool, adding an element of thrill and mystery to the ride, but also for its theme. Around 1900, in the era of technological developments that enabled people to travel further and more easily than ever before, most dark rides based their theme on the idea of travel. For both Prater’s Grottenbahn and Kennywood’s Old Mill, early scenes are known to have depicted famous places on earth. The narrative of A Trip to the Moon took the idea of travelling even one level higher – literally. Hell Gate, however, based its theme on the religious concept of Hell. Interestingly enough, this idea was partly based on economic considerations since in New York only parks including ‘religious entertainment’ were allowed to open on Sundays. Sadly the renowned ride only lasted six years: in 1911 Hell Gate was destroyed in a huge fire, which fortunately did not result in any casualties. Ironically such a giant Inferno was probably the most appropriate way to destroy the boat ride to Hell.
The English River Caves
An adaptation of the dark boat ride that has had a significantly longer life than the Hell Gate can still be found at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. This famous park could be referred to as the English Coney Island, being an amusement park with a successful start around the turn of the century and having a significant impact on the rise of the amusement park industry in general. Just like at Coney Island, the location on the seashore and at the end of a railway line started to draw lots of tourists to the town of Blackpool, which inevitably inspired entrepreneurs to establish entertainment venues to take their share of visitors. Two of these were William George Bean and John Outhwaite, business partners who in 1896 bought a plot of land at the very end of the already famous Blackpool Boardwalk and established Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Even today, the park is still owned by the family of Bean, with the current managing director being his great-granddaughter Amanda Thompson.
Although Blackpool Pleasure Beach was founded in 1896, the first major amusement ride did not appear until 1904 when ‘Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machine’ opened, a swing ride designed by the British inventor of the same name, which is still the oldest operating ride in the park. One year later, the park opened The River Caves of the World: an immense dark boat ride in the same vein as the Old Mill in Kennywood. Riders would board a boat and be transported into a fake mountain, which was visible from most of the park’s grounds. After their tour through the mysterious River Caves, riders would exit the mountain with a splash. The theme of the River Caves has been very consistent throughout its existence: even though changes to the ride’s interior were made, the narrative has always centred on journeys to far flung lands, just like in the majority of other rides of the same era.
Rides like the River Caves created a format for experiencing travel to other countries through a singular location based attraction, making the experience of such travels available to a larger public. In 1977 park director Geoffrey Thompson described a similar idea behind his addition of a replica of the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the ride: “The temples are no longer on view to the Western World since the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia so you could say that we are offering people the only chance they will get to see them” (Quoted in Zika, 2021). Just like the Old Mill, the River Caves served the public desire to travel through 360-degree environments and have the feeling of being transported somewhere else, somewhere out of their everyday life. In that sense, these dark rides are still inspired by the same idea that sparked the creation of the panorama paintings in the 18th Century, which marked the start of our story.
The dark ride at the brink of the First World War
The River Caves at Blackpool Pleasure Beach would definitely not be the last installation of an Old Mill-type of ride. In the following years, similar rides appeared in (amongst others) Rocky Glen Park (PA, U.S.A.), Luna Park at Coney Island and Pleasureland Southport (U.K.). Clearly, the dark ride has risen to a ride format in the 10 years since Paul Boyton launched his Tunnel of Love. In particular, the Tunnel of Love/Old Mill-rides rapidly spread around the world, taking on different forms in each park to match the local desires. Within Austria, the Grottenbahn saw a similar development, becoming a ride format which was copied multiple times.
The development of this ride format occurred over a rather short period of time from 1890 to 1905. This development was built upon inventions that had their roots in early entertainment, like panoramas and phantasmagorias. Some inventions, like the serpentine sluiceway, would cause a chain of rides to continue on its idea, while others would be so ground-breaking that no-one was capable of building a similar experience (A Trip to the Moon). But let us not forget that this series of inventions took place in a time when amusement rides in all kinds of formats were developed rapidly. The amusement industry grew astonishingly fast in those days, and dark rides were just one product of that. Some developments which initially strived for a similar experience would take another path and become a whole different type of ride – such as the gravity powered ‘Scenic Railway’, which originally included scenes, but turned into a scene-less version of the roller coaster.
Just as quickly as the development of the dark ride had started, so rapidly did it demise after 1905. Technology was still a problematic limiting factor in the creation of individual indoor experiences. With the train ride, the canal ride and the gravity ride being developed as a way to transport visitors along scenes, most of the possibilities were investigated. By the time of the outbreak of the First World War, no new inventions were made regarding dark rides, though new installations of Old Mill-rides kept popping up. It would take until the late 1920’s before the world of dark rides was shaken up again, when technology finally allowed for electrically driven individual cars. But that is a story for another time.
© Dark Ride Database
Article by Luc
Research by Alan and Luc
We would like to thank Joel Zika (The Dark Ride Project) for his advice on this article
Barber, X. (1989). “Phantasmagorical Wonders: The Magic Lantern Ghost Show in Nineteenth-Century America” Film History, 3(2), 73-86
Dark Attraction & Funhouse Enthusiasts: http://www.dafe.org/articles/darkrides/darkSideOfKennywood.html
Defunctland: The History of Coney Island: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C5kxkBPhpE
DÖW (Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes). Archived letter by Franz West, dated February 1934. https://www.doew.at/erinnern/biographien/erzaehlte-geschichte/februar-1934/franz-west-jetzt-muss-man-was-machen
Kwaitek, B. (1995) The Dark Ride, published thesis (MSc), Western Kentucky University
Nye, R.B. (1981) “Eight Ways of Looking at an Amusement Park” The Journal of Popular Culture 15 (1) pp. 63-75
Silverman, S.M. (2019) The Amusement Park: 900 years of thrills and spills, and the dreamers and schemers who built them, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Theme Park Insider: https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/201302/3378/
Wien Geschichte Wiki: https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Grottenbahn
Zika, J. (2021) The Historic Dark Ride: Reimagined for virtual experience, PHD research, Swinburne University


Writing Terms Glossary
A statement usally made at the end of an introduction that the writer will support throughout the analysis. The thesis is the idea that the writer focuses on and re-enforces in each paragraph and evidence. Depending on the prompt, the thesis should include the author’s name and a theme/thematic term.
The first sentence of a body paragraph that develops a single idea. The topic sentence clearly supports the thesis and is then broken down through reasoning, evidence, and explication throughout the paragraph. Strong topic sentences help keep the organization of an analysis clear and the writer on track.
The first paragraph of an essay or literary analysis. Introductions are commonly started with a broad idea and then get narrowed down. They generally give background info to help the reader understand your argument. Oftentimes, the writer will provide a short summary of the literary work and a brief definition of the theme. The last sentence of an introduction is usually the thesis statement.
The body paragraphs of your essay are the areas where you will support your thesis, and proving your point. The body paragraphs should illustrate close reading, and a firm understanding of the text. Evidence and interpretation belong in the body paragraphs.
· Evidence- the quotes that support the claim made in the thesis. Evidence is commonly illustrated through direct quotes. Evidence should not be too long but should be purposeful.
· Interpretation- the breakdown of evidence. Interpretation follows the evidence, but does not simply summarize it. This is where the writers the text and explain how the evidence operates to support the writers' interpretation. It reflects their own thoughts appropriately.
where ideas from throughout the essay are unified. The conclusion is not simply a summary of the entire analysis, but the paragraph that will leave the reader in a state of enlightenment. The conclusion should reinforce the thesis in different words.
In our website, we also refer to the concept of pre-writing as “inventing.” Pre-writing is the process one takes before beginning formally drafting an essay, or other written work, to help generate ideas. This process is critical as you begin to work on a paper because it allows writers to make a game-plan, so to speak, of how they’ll accomplish their task. Some forms of pre-writing could include practices like free writing, creating thought webs or Venn diagrams, or composing an outline of key ideas. For literary analysis, this often involves comparing your prompt with the piece of literature you’re analyzing, and brainstorming ideas on what you can draw from the text to fulfill the assignment’s expectations. For more information on what it means to pre-write, click here to discover the “inventing” section of our website.
Making pre-writing work for you is all about understanding what you personally need to get a good start on your writing process. This doesn’t mean that you have to complete a specific regimen, or follow particular steps, but it does mean that you use strategies that will beneficial for your personally, and for that specific writing assignment, to get started. For me, many times this means that I’m just making an outline of key ideas to discuss, or maybe listing some of the most important concepts from the piece I might want delve into more deeply. Depending on the nature of my assignment, that format will change. If I’m doing a comparative piece, I may make a Venn diagram to get the basic ideas onto paper, and then later maybe outline them. For understanding how certain literary elements contribute to theme, I may list each important element I find in the text, and then categorize particular examples under each type in a list-format. This would help me later to find my supporting evidence for my argument. Understanding the kind of work you’re doing, and then working to make that process as simple, and as effective as possible is the basis of figuring out how to pre-write effectively. Once you understand the information you need, it should be easier to gather examples from the text that support that.
For some literary analysis assignments, it can be helpful to journal as you work to both collect your thoughts, and to set goals for your writing process. For literary analysis, completing double entry journals while you read can be hugely beneficial once you start writing. In this process, you include a quotation that you find intriguing (whether for diction, characterization, theme, or other factors you may write about later) on one side of the page, and a short analysis of that quote on the other. This will help you later when you’re beginning to draft and collect evidence to support your argument. Gathering this information as you read rather than after the fact can help make the writing process much smoother and less painful. You can also journal to log your process on a particular assignment to track your habits as a writer, and keep up with your progress toward specific goals.
Analysis can be a tricky concept for some students because it describes not only the type of work you’re writing, but also a specific process within the writing that lends itself to critical consideration of the text. Literary analysis is carefully considering the text both to discern meaning, and to understand the function of a given literary device used in the text. Analysis of a specific quotation from a text can entail looking closely at the writer’s word choice, tone, and looking for specific literary devices like simile, metaphor, personification, and others. While these parts of the text are important, true analysis is discussing how and why the author included those pieces in the text as a whole. Overall, as literary critics and analyzers, we are interested in the function and the “so what?” aspect of the quotation. To craft a quality literary analysis, we have to look past the obvious, and think critically to explore the reasoning for its existence in the first place.
You truly can’t write any sort of paper, whether it’s a persuasive piece, an analysis, or even creative work, without having some form of supporting evidence to give your argument, or your idea, legs. In terms of writing about literature, supporting evidence is usually direct quotations or paraphrase from within the passage you’re working with. Supporting evidence is how you back yourself up, and show your reader you know what you’re talking about. For example, if I wanted to write a paper on why I think cats are the greatest pets in the world, my readers, especially my dog-loving ones, wouldn’t be satisfied simply with that statement. They expect me to give some sort of valid reasoning to support the claim I made. Even though this example seems silly and trivial, it translates directly into writing about literature. You can’t just write “Harper Lee, in her acclaimed novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, uses foreshadowing and imagery to illustrate the theme that prejudice and racism can create grievous consequences for those who practice them,” without giving some sort of textual evidence to back you up. In a thesis statement like that one, you would need to have several examples of both imagery and foreshadowing that demonstrated this connection to the theme you’ve decided to touch on. Without these examples, it just seems to readers that you’re pulling opinions out of thin air. The evidence helps you solidify your points as factual and fact-based.
One of the hardest parts of finding evidence for a particular writing prompt is going back and looking after the fact, especially if you haven’t annotated as you read. To prevent difficulties and issues in this process, make sure to practice good note-taking practices, through things like journaling, or just plain annotating, as you go.
Free-writing is a part of the brainstorming/pre-paper-writing process that can help you feel more on-track and ready to begin drafting. Free-writing is just the part of the process when the writer sits down and puts words and ideas on a page with very little specific organization. The goal here is to simply generate ideas, and provide yourself with the raw material for moving forward and starting to outline or even draft your paper. For some people, this can be very neat and structured, with ideas carefully arranged into categories; for others though, this part of the process is just a good ol’ word vomit onto either a blank piece of paper, or onto a clean word document. Essentially, the only rule is that you should come out of this period with more ideas and more physical material than you started with. This is a great way to figure out what specific ideas of a text you’re most interested in working with or researching, or even understanding what you may already know the most about. The best thing about this process is that you, as the writer, can make it whatever you want or need it to be for your own routine. In this phase of the process, just do you!
Revising is a critical part of the paper-writing process for writers at all levels. Following peer-review, or even a one-on-one conference with your teacher or professor, you will probably have some notes about content to add, remove, or reorganize so that your paper flows more nicely. Making these important content changes, as well as those you may identify through your own reviewing, is the process of revising. As you work to correct and change key content pieces of your work, like bulking up a quotation analysis, or choosing new supporting evidence (quotations, paraphrase, or summary) from your text, you ultimately get your paper closer to your final copy. Taking time to review your work and go through this process is the best way for writers to ensure that their papers are both organized, and focused. Going through revisions allows writers to revisit tricky points, and to even catch errors you may not have noticed while writing. Before submitting any paper, always make sure to at least look over your work yourself so you can smooth these things over.
Sometimes, revisions can happen on the computer screen before you print your first big draft, but it can often be helpful, once you have a completed draft, to print it off and scan with a bright-colored ink pen. I find that reading on paper after staring at a screen for hours at a time can help me think about my work more critically, and more carefully. For more in-depth explanations of how to carry out the revision process on your own paper, and to get more tips on completing this process effectively, click here.
Conferencing is an extremely valuable tool for writers as in the process of polishing their work for submission. This process involves bringing your paper, in whatever state it’s in, to a meeting between you as the writer, and your teacher or professor for discussion. Since conferencing can occur at different stages of the writing process, what happens at the meeting depends on what you need at that moment. For example, I’ve scheduled conferences with my professors before when I had very little work done on my paper outside of a rough outline. At this stage, conferencing can be helpful for gaining ideas on how to move forward in your work; it could be about finding supporting evidence for your claims, figuring out what to do with the evidence you’ve accumulated, or building a quality thesis statement. In later stages of the process, such as drafting, conferencing is beneficial for getting feedback on what you’ve already written (before you have to turn it in for a grade), and to make sure you’re on the right track. This is important, especially if you have questions or confusions about the assignment because your teacher can help provide important clarifications for what they want you to include moving forward. Conferencing at the final stage of the writing process can bring writers a level of direction for revising and editing—a professor or teacher may notice small, harder to identify errors, like those of organization or flow, which you as the writer may not. Having an extremely experienced set of eyes on your work at this point can help with the polishing and perfecting process.
While conferencing can be a great tool for writers, it does require you to do a little extra leg-work to make it the most of both yours, and your professor’s time. To make the most of the experience, make sure to come into the meeting with specific questions or points of concern about your paper. If you’re vague in your questions, or unsure of what you need help with, your professor can’t help you as well. Providing them with an idea of where you feel you’re struggling can give them a sense of direction as they’re reading and reviewing, and can help them give you useful advice. You should also make sure you have copies of your work (at whatever stage it’s in) for both you and your professor. While you could send it in electronically if you’re professor/teacher agrees, I recommend having a paper copy. This can help you both see things you may miss on the computer screen, and is a great note-taking tool for you as you go back and revise and edit after the conference.
Like conferencing, peer-review is all about meeting up with someone else, who has fresh eyes about the work, to get feedback. In this case, however, you would meet with a classmate, student tutor, or other peer to get guidance for moving forward in the writing process.
Peer-review can take place at any stage of writing, and is a discussion about what you may need at that point. If you’re in the planning stage, and maybe just have a general idea, or an outline of your tentative plan, peer-review can be a time to bounce ideas off of each other, or textual evidence to support your claims, or even work toward building a strong thesis statement. Later on, once you have an outline, or even a draft, peer review can be a time to assess the level of the analysis you’ve already completed, and make sure you’re on the right track for moving forward.
Once the draft is mostly completed, peer-review is a great way to get revisions and edits for your paper—your peer can help you work through the nitty-gritty of establishing good organization and clear flow, and even help correct small, grammatical or typing errors throughout the work. Overall, peer-review can be helpful because it allows you the opportunity to talk through your ideas and thoughts about the paper with someone who 1) is not grading you, and therefore, is free of pressure, and 2) to get the perspective and opinion of someone who is a little removed from the process.
After working hard on writing your paper, you may not be in the place to comb over your work again and again to catch small errors. Someone who has not had these ideas on their mind for several days at a time will be better able to help you sift through the small stuff.
After reading an essay prompt, or maybe a rubric, you may have noticed a section titled “organization,” and felt confused about what that means. Thankfully, the concept of organization in a paper-writing standpoint is quite straight-forward: for a paper to be organized, it’s sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately, the work as a whole fit together, and are ordered in a way that makes sense for the reader, and helps them to get from point A to point B effectively.
To ensure you’re creating a well-organized paper, you should start your writing process by creating an outline, and framing the rest of your work under sections of the outline where they seem to fit best. This structure creates the general backbone of your work, and helps give you a format to follow. Once you’ve broken your ideas into sections, or eventual paragraphs, on the outline form, you’ll want to construct a thesis statement that presents your ideas in the same order that they appear on the outline. Building a thesis around these ideas helps your readers know what to expect as they begin to read your paper, and thus, increase your organization.
Once you’ve built your thesis statement and know what each paragraph to follow will be about, organization has to happen within those paragraphs to continue the flow you’ve established. Within paragraphs, creating clear, explicit topic sentences, following them with supporting evidence from the text, analysis of that evidence, and then a clear concluding sentence that ties back to the topic sentence will help to achieve that. You’ll follow this pattern for all of your paragraphs, and conclude the paper by tying all the ideas back together, and back to your thesis. By always making sure to connect each smaller part to the larger ideas you present in your thesis, you’ll create an argument that is effectively organized, and structured in a way that will improve your argument.
Audience, in writing literary analysis, can mean two things: 1) the author of the literature’s audience, or 2) your audience as a writer of analysis. It’s important to consider the author’s audience because that can determine both the words the author uses, and the message they’re trying to convey. For example, the meaning of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” drastically changes if you as a reader understand Swift’s audience—the piece is a satire discussing how to effectively combat famine and malnourishment in Ireland: by eating babies. Not understanding his target demographic at the time, the English people who don’t seem to care, readers may think he’s completely serious, and seriously disturbed. This is not the case, though, because he uses his audience and their beliefs, and crafts a satire around that to shift their perspective on the issue he raises. Identifying and understanding the audience, with literature, can take a little bit of research and investigative work on your part—however, it’s worth it for understanding all of the author’s nuances and ideas within the piece.
You can also approach audience from the standpoint of you as a writer, doing literary analysis. In any paper you write, whether you realize it or not, you consider audience. You wouldn’t use informal, slang-filled language in writing a literary analysis because you realize that your professor or teacher wouldn’t like that very much. Deciding who you’re trying to target, and what you’re trying to accomplish in targeting them is the key to deciding what sort of tone to take, what words to use, and how to structure and frame your argument. If I was writing a literary analysis, I would make sure to create a structured, well-organized argument that uses professional, formal language and strong diction. However, if I was writing a personal essay or an informal letter, I may soften up, and use less rigid language and form. Knowing who you’re talking to, and what they would be more receptive of based on the circumstances, is a key part of addressing your audience effectively in any piece of writing.
If organization is all about structuring your paper in a way that makes everything fit together nicely, unity is the result of that. Though unity can mean several things, you’ll encounter it most often in your writing in terms of how your individual sentences, and then paragraphs fit together. A good, unified paragraph has a specific topic sentence, and then all subsequent sentences work to prove that point. In a unified paragraph, there would be no extra, stray sentences without a home. They all fit together to prove your point. In ensuring you build unity in your paragraphs, you can model your paragraphs around your supporting evidence. When I write a paper, I decide on a key idea, make that into a topic sentence, and then choose textual evidence to back those ideas up. Then, once I have those pieces, I add the analysis, which creates the “so what” of my argument. To finish up the paragraph and make sure it’s polished, go back and add transitional phrases to make sure the ideas flow together in a way that makes sense, and add a conclusion sentence that wraps everything up nicely. Writing your entire paper, then, follows this same procedure, just on a larger scale.
Think of your intro paragraph as one big topic sentence, and then your body paragraphs as three opportunities to support those ideas. Then, you tie it all up with a bow in the conclusion, and remind your audience how it all comes together. Incorporating strong topic sentences and a strong thesis, and then tapering through this process in each paragraph helps to establish unity, and helps make sure every sentence in every paragraph is always supporting the same goal: to prove your thesis.
These bare-bones and ideas are critical in creating a unified argument, but to put the finishing touches on the paper, you’ll also need to make sure to add in transitions and concluding statements (whether sentences, or a paragraph, depending on the context). These features help create a flow in your argument, and make sure everything connects effectively.
Purpose is applicable both to your writing, and to the works you’re reading. An author’s purpose when writing is, essentially, the goals they hope to accomplish through their work. No matter what you read, whether its literature, an advertisement, or even your favorite internet meme, everything has a purpose. For advertisements, the goal may be to get you to buy a specific product, or to believe in a certain idea. In the case of memes and other similar media, the author’s purpose may have been not only to entertain, but also to make the readers/viewers think about a social issue, or other big-picture idea.
Though you could probably pick any text and decide whether the author’s purpose was to inform, entertain, or question readers on a given idea, it’s more important to get to the bigger goal. What specifically was the author hoping to achieve, and what features and devices did they use to communicate that? For example, with the novel The Great Gatsby, I could assume that it’s just a story meant to entertain me with tales about riches and romance. However, more than that, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s larger purpose in Gatsby could be to explore the realm of the rich and successful from an outsider’s perspective, and offer insights to explain the lives of those who live within it.
Knowing how to talk about purpose is important for understanding what your teachers might want as you begin the preliminary process of analyzing a text. Understanding the message, or messages, they’re trying to convey through their work can change your perspective on the reading, and enhance your understanding overall. In your own writing, your purpose is essentially to prove your thesis throughout the paper. Think of the thesis statement as a purpose statement, and work throughout your paper, with textual evidence and analysis, to support your claims as plausible and valid.
Making your Writing Process Work for You
"Personally, I find the hardest part of writing is knowing how and where to start. Using this glossary, I hope you'll gain a better understanding, not only of the mechanics of these concepts, but of how to make them effective for you in your own writing. Sitting down and getting a draft started doesn't have to be scary or painful--using these techniques, and incorporating them effectively into your practice, you'll be able to breeze through every part of the writing process from start to finish." -Allie