and others, the scientific and technical project, out of which has arisen industrial and now postmodern culture, is profoundly indebted to the reproducibility and, most crucially, the contrastibility of visual artifacts forming what these authors consider to be the ultimate basis of scientific claims. Supporting the significance of visual contrastibility to science, Helmers notes “the developing importance of sight, seeing, and collecting visual objects” during the Enlightenment (emphasis ours; Pears and Jardine, 71–72).
Scientific representations remain, however, thoroughly constructed, thoroughly rhetorical—a fact all too easy for viewers to forget. Paul Dombrowski records in “Ernst Haeckel’s Controversial Visual Rhetoric” how the German naturalist and illustrator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries deliberately misrepresented the embryos of a variety of animals and humans in his line drawings, presumably to substantiate his theory of monism, which viewed science as “including areas of knowledge usually not associated with science, such as religion, ethics, and politics” (305). His broad definition of science appealed to leaders of the Nazi movement because it could be used to promote the idea of national history and identity. Ultimately, Haeckel’s work was implicated in the propaganda efforts of the Nazis, who propounded social Darwinism. His theories were debunked, but not before many textbooks in the United States and elsewhere had incorporated his illustrations; recently, they have become evidence for some creationists in their critique of evolutionary biology.
Today, scientist-photographers commonly accept as legitimate an array of rhetorical practices including but by no means limited to colorizing, selecting, and retouching. Anne R. Richards addresses scientific license in “Argument and Authority in the Visual Representations of Science” by deconstructing a series of images appearing in one figure in the American Journal of Botany: 19 photomicrographs and, curiously, one line drawing created to replace a photographic image. According to Nels Lersten, her interview subject and former editor of the journal, such a drawing might constitute an instance of “nature-faking” because the original photograph required enhancement if it was to be mustered in support of the author’s claim. Just as among the readers of advertising it is understood that photography illustrates a product in an ideal state, among expert readers of science it is understood that photographic images represent a claim in its most persuasively constructed visual form.
Technical and Professional Communication
“A Historical Look at Electronic Literacy: Implications for the Education of Technical Communicators,” Cynthia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher’s article on the uses of electronic communication at the end of the twentieth century, predicts that rapid changes will continue to occur and that technical communicators will need to learn and to apply the latest advances. But in a review of books he sees as primarily lauding the electronic age, Stephen Doheny-Farina warns that many consequences of this rapid change need assessment, among them the loss of direct communication among individuals. Craig Stroupe emphasizes the need for teachers in the digital classroom to move beyond the instrumental objectives often implicit in institutional initiatives and to guide students towards a “constitutive literacy,” one in which dialogue among multimedia voices, e.g., between image and sound, is discernible and the image-word relation is not merely illustrative. Ideally, according to Stroupe, voices will be given reign to “speak to one another” (“The Rhetoric of Irritation,” 245) through a “coherent inappropriateness” (251) enabling students to discover the ideological basis of culture. Stroupe’s thoughtful critique, however, evidences limited tolerance for the traditionally utilitarian aims of technical writing—that is, for the honing of language enabling “work to get done” in an, or the most, efficient way. It should be mentioned here that because the field of technical communication must concern itself, in part, with technological changes transforming communication in science and industry, it has been among the first specialities within English studies to widely acknowledge the importance of visual rhetoric. Stephen Bernhardt’s 1986 article “Seeing the Text” is groundbreaking in its explanation of the importance of design to readability in a range of fields and audiences.
Charles Kostelnick, who has written extensively on the history and theory of visual design, details a rubric for visual design in “A Systematic Approach to Visual Language in Business Communication.” Recently, he describes in “Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874–1925” a history of graphics beginning in the early nineteenth century, when the U.S. government published statistical atlases of census data on immigrants. The designers of these atlases developed conventions that still influence the graphical presentation of data.
Jacques Bertin applies a semiotic approach to the creation of graphs, maps, and diagrams. He differentiates between monosemic systems, where meanings are specified and clearly understood, i.e., the graphic meaning, and polysemic systems, in which readers choose from a group of similar signs, making signification comparatively subjective (2). His discussion of size, value, texture, color, orientation, and shape in graphic design provide a useful framework for analysis and discussion of visual artifacts.
Edward R. Tufte, coiner of the term chartjunk, complicates the discussion of graphic displays in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by addressing the dangers of uncritically accepting visual representations of data. Likewise, Carlos Salinas reprimands technical communicators for approaching the visual primarily as a vehicle for disseminating truth and for failing to exploit its many potentials, especially for cultural critique. His article “Technical Rhetoricians and the Art of Configuring Images” describes Punk Ska’s 1998 anti-Nike website, which reconfigures the swoosh as a “modified swastika” and adds the slogan “Nike: Made by Kids in Sweat Shops” (178) to illustrate how multimedia texts can be reread.
Donna Kienzler applies in “Visual Ethics” general ethical principles to the selection of material for visual displays in professional communication documents as well as to their design and identifies criteria for evaluating visual data. Nancy Allen’s “Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing’s Not Believing Anymore” provides instruction and examples for the ethical construction of visuals, and lists visual rhetoric sources that would be helpful to professional communicators working on visual design. David critiques the ethics of the elaborate visuals placed in corporate annual reports, asserting that the “reports” are mythmaking documents rather than objective summaries of the year’s activities (“Mythmaking”).
Among those writers who have lamented the slow incorporation of a broader rhetorical focus into technical communication curricula are Richards and David. We point out in “Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web” that the widely circulated advice to avoid color in technical documents unless for logical purposes is anachronistic, for color obviously commands the attention of readers of technical information in hybrid documents, both in print and on the Web. Thus, we encourage colleagues to reconsider the assumptions that the decorative is irrelevant to students of technical and writing, or that attempts to study the decorative are doomed to be “non-rigorous” (Helmers and Hill 2), and to conduct research into the pathos of technical writing. We agree with Helmers’ assessment that theories of visual rhetoric provide opportunities to “unhing[e] the traditional dynamic of pleasure/expressiveness and function/persuasiveness in favor of a dialogic, transactional viewing” (65).
Pedagogical Approaches
Several books have been published recently that respond to the burgeoning interest in visual and verbal intersections in the writing classroom. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers’s anthology, Defining Visual Rhetorics, offers a rich menu of visual genres useful to teachers and scholars in rhetoric and communication disciplines; the text has generated thoughtful discussion in our graduate document design courses, and this introductory chapter has cited numerous essays from the text. Charles Kostelnick and David D. Roberts’s textbook Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators covers visual theory and application for advanced college students in business and technical majors. Nancy Allen’s Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance constructs a broadly interdisciplinary
