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2 Seeing Rhetoric
Nancy Allen
It’s safe to say that rhetoric—as an approach to using words to inform, deliberate, and persuade—has been tested by the ages. Uses of rhetoric reach from the classical period of Greek civilization to modern writing classrooms, policy determinations, and political campaigns. Explanations of and guidelines for using rhetoric in written and oral communication abound.
We live, however, in a visually oriented time. According to Arthur Berger, author of numerous books on culture and media, “We live in a world of things seen, a world that is visual [. . .]. Like fish, we ‘swim’ in a sea of images, and these images help shape our perceptions of the world and of ourselves” (1). Ann Marie Seward Barry, author of Visual Intelligence, concurs, observing, “Visual communication dominates every area of our lives” (3). We now recognize that effective communication includes more than words.
Imagine yourself about to read an essay or listen to a speech. Your first impressions begin with visual elements. Before we read the opening sentence or hear a speaker’s first words, we have already begun to form impressions from the setting, the medium, and the speaker’s appearance. These features fall within the domain of visual rhetoric. We bring a different set of expectations to reading a magazine, comic book, or the Web, to comments by a sequined rock star or a white-coated doctor, to a lecture in a museum or a chat in a coffee bar or online. 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