Hmmm, Visual Rhetoric… What the hell is it?

Any time I see the word “rhetoric” I cringe.  It has such a sinister sound; one you just have to know that it equates awful.  Just say the word:  “R – H – E – T – O – R – I – C ”. Yikes!  I guess most any word that ends with an “ick” doesn’t sound so great. “Visual”. Yes, that’s a word I can relate to! I know this from the lens of a camera, the lens of my eye, and the little lenses happening all around me. 

When you put the two together, I’m not sure that I believed that you could get something related to academia.

•       Photon Language?
•       Receptor Words?
•       Pretty Prose?
•       Picture Discourse?
•       Optical Speech?
•       Artfully Communicating?
•       Graphically Speaking?

Using some dissection, as you see above, it conveys something that could mean a lot of different things to an array of colorful people, merely interpreting the individual definitions. The relationship of these two words brings immediately to mind the works of Alison Bechdel; Fun Home, where she’s giving her account of growing up in comic form, not to mention her current life happenings.  I guess that would be visual rhetoric. Videos, ads, commercials, brochures, and a host of other media, campaigning and advertising could also offer highly persuasive content, and does.

The combination of linguistic content with added visual components allows consumers and the general public the susceptibility of this powerful influence; visual rhetoric, and we are surrounded by it each day. From Sirc, it would be compositional media which allows both textual pleasure from collections of text and imagery (Box Logic, 116).

The world is full of arguments! Why would visual rhetoric be any different? Of course there will be differences in what is interpreted from a perceived image, not to mention what text will do to us. No two people are going to see exactly what you are visualizing! They can’t!  This association, then, would be known as the argument. It is the arrangement of defined elements on a page, font selection, and images which all create and define “argument”.

WHAT SHARON THINKS IS… Visual Rhetoric is a sketchbook narrative of all that is seen and unseen and a more modernist view of a lens, any lens, which unfurls a story.