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.
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Photon Language?
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Receptor Words?
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Pretty Prose?
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Picture Discourse?
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Optical Speech?
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Artfully Communicating?
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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.