in “Drawn to Multiple Sides: Making Arguments Visible” an assignment for which students choose images and create texts to explore alternative viewpoints. The Feature Articles Multiple Sides Project elicits from students rhetorical analyses, new perspectives, innovative approaches to visual layout, and stylistic experiments in voice. This chapter provides examples of student writing and offers a companion webpage.
Ryan Jerving’s rubric “Thirteen Ways to Read a Black-and-White Photograph” identifies key compositional elements in black-and-white photography and highlights their potential influences on interpretation. Jerving also presents an activity that will help students of writing develop a rhetorical appreciation for the photograph as a designed object by considering the key issues of its subject matter, camera work, scene of representation, and institutional location.
Mark Mullen’s chapter, “Collapsing Floors and Disappearing Walls: Teaching Visual and Cultural Intertexts in Electronic Games,” recommends that teachers import electronic games as objects of analysis into the writing classroom. While preparing teachers for the challenges that can attend analysis of this genre in typical wired classrooms, Mullen explains how the visual elements of games can require interpretive strategies as complex as those applied to traditional literary texts. His analysis of American McGee’s Alice demonstrates that electronic games can be sophisticated texts suited to college-level analysis.
Kristin Walker Pickering’s “Revising for Activity Purposes: Improving Document Design for Reader-Oriented Activities” considers the relevance of activity theory to the human factors of website design. Focusing on the effective integration of text and graphics from a user-design perspective, Pickering discusses work her students have undertaken in revising workplace documents. To illustrate how complex the analysis of users and stakeholders can be as well as the usefulness of activity theory in facilitating analysis, Walker focuses on the efforts of a student to make a state government website more readable.
In the Western tradition, the value of sense data to inquiry was a driving question 2,600 years ago among the presocratics. Heraclitus concluded that “sight tells falsehoods” (McKirahan 118) although the eyes are yet “more accurate witnesses than the ears” (119). Parmenides claimed that mortals were benighted because they accepted as reality what they saw; Anaxogoras’s paradox of color illustrated this same point. But Empedocles articulated an ancient rationale for triangulation, enjoining the inquirer to allow the mind to question the certainties of the senses, and the senses to destabilize the mind’s cherished beliefs:
Look with every means of apprehension, in whatever way each thing is clear, Not holding any sight more in trust than [what comes] through hearing, Or loud-sounding hearing above the things made clear by the tongue, And do not hold back trust in any of the other members, Whatever way there is a channel for understanding, but Understanding each thing in whatever way it is clear. (McKirahan 235)
Empedocles’s point was not to privilege any one of the senses, but to utilize each as fully as possible. From this perspective, an interest in the visual and in the study of alternative theories, methodologies, tools, and worldviews that such an interest entails, would advantage the inquirer-writer. We believe that by cultivating new approaches to thinking, knowing, and communicating, our students may find themselves making a habit of the wonder that formed the daily diet of those remarkable inquirers who puzzled through reality in a less fragmented time.
Note
1. Because Benjamin committed suicide on meeting resistance during an attempt to leave Paris during the occupation and emigrate to the United States, most of his work was published posthumously, writes Hannah Arendt in the introduction to Illuminations, which reprints “The Work of Art” from Zeischrift für Sozialforschun (Journal for Social Research) V 1936.
Works Cited
Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: 3 Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.
Alfano, Christine L., and Alyssa J. O’Brien. Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World. New York: Longman, 2005. Companion website: http://wps.ablongman.com/ long_alfano_envision_1.
Allen, Nancy. “Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing’s Not Believing Anymore.” Technical Communication Quarterly 5.1 (1996): 87–105.
—, ed. Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance. Westport, CT: Ablex, 2002.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Visual Thinking. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
—. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: U of California P, 1965.
Barry, Anne Marie Seward. Visual Intelligence: Perception, Image, and Manipulation in Visual Communication. Albany: SUNY P, 1997.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
—. Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
—. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968: 219–53.
Berger, John et al. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Company and Penguin Books, 1977.
Bernhardt, Stephen. “Seeing the Text.” College Composition and Communication 37.1 (1986): 66–78.
Bertin, Jacques. Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks Maps. Trans. William J. Berg. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1983.
Blakesley, David. “Defining Film Rhetoric: The Case of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.” Hill and Helmers, 111–34.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.
Curtis, James. Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.
David, Carol. “Investitures of Power: Portraits of Professional Women.” Technical Communication Quarterly 10.1 (2001): 5–29.
—. ”Mythmaking in Annual Reports.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.2 (2001): 195–222.
Dickinson, Greg, and Casey Malone Maugh. “Placing Visual Rhetoric: Finding Material Comfort in Wild Oats Market.” Hill and Helmers, 259–76.
Doheny-Farina, Stephen. “Reviews” [City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn by William J. Mitchell; The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age by Allucquie’re Rosanne Stone; Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology. ed. Gretchen Bender and Timothy Druckery]. Technical Communication Quarterly 5.2 (1996): 183–87.
Dombrowski, Paul M. “Ernst Haeckel’s Controversial Visual Rhetoric. Technical Communication Quarterly 12.3 (2003): 303–19.
Edwards, Janis L. “Echoes of Camelot: How Images Construct Cultural Memory Through Rhetorical Framing.” Hill and Helmers, 179–94.
Faigley, Lester, Diana George, Anna Palchick, and Cynthia Selfe. Picturing Texts. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2004.
George, Diana. “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing.” College
