The essence of understanding visual literacy lies in the visually literate exploration of issues process. This understanding must deal with both the processes involved in the creation and interpretation of concrete visual communication. Visual discourses's greatest contribution to human knowledge and thought is not the sequential, linear, analytical text but the encompassing and holistic visual image. The former is rule driven and literally based while the latter is ambiguous, holistically rich, synthetic, and metaphoric in meaning. Highlights include: process specific view of brain hemispheres; two process specific characteristics of visual literacy: generative functions of graphic ideation and epistemological characteristics of visual representation; visual interpretation; viewer response theory; multicontextual thought; visual process linguistics: descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical, and geographical; psychomorphology; visual logic; and bisociation. Charts, diagrams and illustrations are included. (Contains 35 references.) (DGM)