Watch this brief video (about 6 minutes) on visual rhetoric:
Purdue OWL: Visual Rhetoric – YouTube
To think about visual rhetoric is to think about how your choices in images, document formatting, color, etc. can have a wide range of influences on your audience.
You might include things in writing (or even without writing) like:
- Tables
- Charts
- Illustrations/Figures
- Maps
- Photos
- Infographics/Data Visualizations beyond Tables/Charts
- Icons (e.g., a logo, a red octagon to symbolize stopping)
- Elements of document design (color, font size, font type, lines/borders, spacing)
- Video
- What else?
To depict:
- Objects (diagram of mechanics of a machine, natural photograph of a tree, etc.)
- Numbers (statistics of company performance, etc.)
- Concepts (flow chart, concept map, hierarchical chart for org, model of theory like CMAP model of communication in BWE)
- Words (font, color, borders/lines, other elements of document design)
Tips:
- Be purposeful: just like words, carefully consider audience needs and goal of document before choosing and composing a visual component. Redundancy is totally okay, but NOT if it is making your document too long.
- Cite any reference to a visual you did not create. If not in public domain or under CC license, you should recreate if drawn from public data instead of copy/pasting.
- If working digitally, consider possible formatting issues. Something pulled from a website or from a PNG or JPEG may not look the same in a Google Doc, Word file, or PDF file. Consider adjustments as needed.
- More resources for finding and using images can be found on this resource page I made about a number of resources on images, audio, etc.
- To create or edit images, get comfortable being uncomfortable in programs like Excel, Photoshop, InDesign, PowerPoint, Publisher, etc. Lots of tutorials online: YouTube, and free resources elsewhere that can help you learn as you go.
- Be creative! People generally respond well to writing that has some images interspersed in a careful way. Always ask if there are ways to convert the more complicated parts of your writing into imagery somehow, or, to support parts of your writing with imagery that livens up your writing.
- Don’t forget about accessibility! Always a good practice to use image descriptions, consider issues with color blindness, etc. We will talk more about this on 4/19.
Task
No task on this page. Please just review the above as it will be important in considering for the rest of the module as well as what we do next week.
When finished reviewing, click the button below to continue:
