Even the look of a piece of writing sets up expectations that influence how we will interact with it.
When words spread across a page
Or are in short centered lines,
We recognize
We’re in a creative space,
And our past experiences
With poetry
Influence our reading.
Visual rhetoric refers to the visual features of communication and the effects they have on readers/viewers. When we become sensitive to the visual features of our communications, we can begin using them to help us achieve our goals in writing and speaking. We also become more aware of how these features are being used to influence us.
Yet, as important as visual rhetoric is to our lives, teaching students to recognize its features and effects and to use them in achieving their own communicative purposes is a complex and difficult task. This volume is dedicated to helping with that task, and in this chapter I argue two points:
1. Visual representations can help us understand rhetorical principles. Sometimes a picture may be worth more than a thousand words—or at least a few hundred words—of explanation.
2. Visual rhetoric can be an effective tool for presenting information and persuading an audience. Examples included here will demonstrate the effectiveness of visuals in specific communications.
This chapter is not organized around assignments, nor does it describe any specific assignment in detail, as other essays in this book do. Instead, I discuss general guidelines for using visual representations for two purposes: to teach rhetorical principles and to present information in a manner intended to persuade or to inform.
Issues in Teaching Visual Rhetoric
Teaching students how to use visual rhetoric is as challenging as teaching them to use written language effectively. One reason for the difficulty stems from our educational system. As children, we are visually oriented, learning to draw before we learn to write. When we enter school, however, language, math, and science are emphasized. Development of our visual skills is usually relegated to art class, which is a small part of the school day or week; in some schools, visual training may not be included at all. Most of us lose our sensitivity to the effects visual elements have on our perceptions. Teaching visual rhetoric, then, isn’t so much teaching a new set of skills as reawakening our visual skills and developing our ways of seeing. In Marcel Proust’s words, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” (qtd. in Barry, 1).
In teaching visual rhetoric, the term rhetoric can itself be an issue. Rhetoric has an ancient lineage and is inexact, an art rather than a science. These very strengths of long history and versatility, however, raise questions for students, who are immersed in their own times and live quite differently from the way citizens in fifth century B.C.E. Athens did. Many students wonder how such an old theory can have anything to do with the issues they face and the documents they’ll be called upon to write in the academy or on the job. Students may find assignments requiring rhetoric to be boring or amusing, but few of them see a reason to take such an ancient process seriously. Rhetoric’s versatility is also a problem. Students may wonder how this system can be useful when it is so variable—when there is no set of rules for using it. Rhetoric’s heuristic strategies are broad and malleable, permitting application to various situations, but this versatility can make rhetoric confusing to writers who are being introduced to its principles.
The visual examples included in this chapter are drawn from current publications and websites to help with both problems—the understanding of rhetoric as language and visual representation, and rhetoric’s relevance to current forms of communication. These visual examples of rhetorical principles at work will connect with current communication practices, thus supporting rhetoric’s importance to today’s writers. In addition, because visual presentations aid understanding and learning, they will show how the principles of rhetoric can operate visually. Citing neurological research, Barry tells us that, “It is no longer possible to divide the process of seeing from that of understanding” (44).
Though Plato may have raged against visuals because he perceived them to be related to emotion rather than to logic, people today are comfortable with and more sophisticated in their interpretation of visuals. We know about Photoshop’s functions for mutating pictures or for morphing one image into another: We know, for example, that people can be added to or taken from a group photo for personal (divorce in a family) or political (a shift in power) reasons. What we see in images may not be factual. Yet images can be very powerful in creating responses in viewers, and they can be very helpful to understanding concepts. As Donald Norman tells us, “The easiest way to make things understandable is to use graphics or pictures” (199).
Visual Representations of Rhetorical Principles
The elements of rhetoric that can be so important to effective communication are defined in many texts, but they can also be presented visually. Visual representation may, in fact, clarify a point about a rhetorical function better than language can for some people. Here, I will focus the discussion on those rhetorical elements often used for effective communication: the persuasive appeals and the rhetorical canon. The samples described below will show how visual rhetoric can incorporate these elements in communications.
Persuasive Appeals
Three rhetorical appeals—logos (the appeal through reason), ethos (the appeal through values and the speaker/writer’s character, credibility, and integrity), and pathos (the appeal through emotions)—undergird Aristotelian rhetorical analysis (Corbett 15). We’ll begin here with logos, which generally gets the most attention and respect in writing classes.
Logos. Aristotle established in The Rhetoric that good arguments are based on good reasons, reasons that are valid, appropriate to the topic discussed, and valued by the audience. It is common practice to articulate those reasons substantially through words. However, in our attempts to inform or to persuade we miss an opportunity if we limit ourselves to words alone. We’re familiar with visuals in their supporting roles, through which they organize and emphasize information. We see examples in colored maps, such as those representing states as red or blue depending on the outcome of their presidential vote; and in line graphs, such as those showing the rise and fall of the stock market. But visuals can play an even more persuasive role, as in the following examples.
To show how information can be carried and developed within a design, Anne Frances Wysocki describes differences in her interactions with two CD-ROMs about art collections: “The differences between the visual presentations of these CDs are differences of assertion and thought” (224). She further explains that various features of the design “might conventionally be called form, and yet clearly they too have carried significant argumentative weight” (231). These design differences influenced Wysocki’s impressions of the collections, one collection being focused, she believed, on the collector and other focused on the works of art. Such impressions influenced the understandings that she formed as she viewed the images and textual information of the collection. Such an in-class analysis and comparison of CD-ROMs or of websites on similar topics might help students begin to see ways in which the design of information influences their opinions.
Visuals can also add information and nuances that serve as elements of the argument itself. In an interview, lawyer Fred Steingold explained how he sometimes uses visuals in making arguments in court. He described a case in which his client was being sued by a neighbor for damages that might or might not have been caused by the client’s sewer during a backup. The lawyer created a poster six feet long, with the client’s property represented on one end and his
