Visual Rhetoric 325 Journal 1

Visual Rhetoric and English

For me, the relationship between visual rhetoric and English boils down to two main ideas: that rhetoric is a general art, and that writing and thinking and visual rhetoric are completely interrelated. The first idea stems from what I am learning about classical rhetoric in the English 614 seminar. In his treatise Ars Rhetorica, Aristotle defines rhetoric as an art, a techne, even though it does not necessarily concern itself with a specific content. He explains that the content of rhetoric is universal knowledge—the subjects that everyone knows. The idea that rhetoric is a general art connects to visual rhetoric because images are all around us. Especially in our media saturated culture, it is vital that we learn to recognize and analyze the effects that these images have own our thoughts and actions. Therefore, because visual rhetoric is a general or universal subject, it could be taught in any department on campus.

Visual rhetoric finds its home in the English department because this is where students learn how to write critically. What actually happens when a student learns to write critically is that he or she learns to think critically. Critical thinking is the most important component to being able to analyze and understand the effects of visual images. Without first learning how to think about visual rhetoric, we cannot understand how images influence us.

Writing and visual rhetoric are related in many other ways as well. For example, in English classes students learn how to compose effective written arguments. While the medium is different, there are strategies that creators use to compose an effective visual argument. While crafting a text, writers might make specific decisions regarding organization and word choice to elicit a certain response in their audience. Similarly, a designer uses colors, fonts, and arrangement of text and images to achieve a purpose. In both texts and images, the creator must be aware of his or her rhetorical situation and consider the work’s context, audience, and purpose. In my exploration of new media in the classroom, I have noticed that experts in this field like Kathleen Yancey and Cynthia Selfe refer to visual images as “visual literacies” or “visual texts.” Perhaps the use of these terms points to another reason why the visual rhetoric class is considered an English class. These terms suggest that an image can be “read” in similar ways that written texts are read. It seems logical that this class would be an English class since students are using similar approaches to composing, analyzing, and understanding both written and visual texts.

My husband has a minor in graphic design, and the majority of the classes he took were affiliated with his university’s art and computer technology departments—not English. As a result, he knows how to create visual images and he instinctively knows what is pleasing to the eye, but he does not really know why something looks good or what effects an image might have on his audience. Quite often, he will create a logo and then ask me to look at it and analyze it for him. I will ask him what his purpose is in order to offer suggestions on how he can effectively achieve that purpose through principles of visual rhetoric. I think that a class on visual rhetoric in the English department offers what other departments do not—the foundation in rhetorical strategies that help us understand how to “read” and think critically about the images that surround us.