Visual Rhetoric

What is visual rhetoric? Visual rhetoric means an efficient way of communicating through visual elements. That could be images, and the fonts of the texts. This skill helps with analyzing these images and understanding their form and meaning. As a student understanding what visual rhetoric means helped me for past assignments. I was able to analyze images and understand their meaning and the form. Since entering college there have been so many changes to how I have to learn things and the ways I should approach something new. As students we are constantly online and learning new things as well as adapting to all the new changes happening to the writing technology.

As we are adapting to the new changes and we are looking at artifacts like websites and playing online games, we are learning how to read critically and how to make assumptions about those websites and those online games. The assumptions we make as we look at these websites and online games are about gender, age and other categories. This helps us analyze those websites and online games and see who the target audience is.

While reading more about visual rhetoric I found out that in order for visual rhetoric to work in a digital writing environment it needs three key features. The first key feature is audience stance. Audience stance means it’s the way that the audience contributes to online documents. The second key feature is transparency. Transparency means the way in which documents online can relate to conventions that have been established. For example, those of print, graphic design and web pages. The last key feature is hybridity. Hybridity means the way in that documents online join and create visual and verbal designs. It also encourages the author and the audience to identify and create numerous identities.

Something else that I have learned is that not every visible object is visual rhetoric. As I continued reading to learn more and to understand more, I read that in order for a visible image to be qualified as visual rhetoric there has to be 3 apparent markers. The first marker is symbolic action. Symbolic action means that an image needs to go past serving as a sign as well as be symbolic with that image incidentally only being connected to what it stands for. An example of symbolic action is a stop sign since it is using a subjective symbol to communicate. A stop sign’s shape and color have no connection to a car stopping as it’s being driven. The reason for it being created was because it is necessary to regulate traffic. The second marker is human intervention. Human intervention means that human action is necessary whichever in the creation process or in the interpretation process. An example of human intervention are trees. Since they are not essentially visual rhetoric until a human decides to take one home for Christmas. The last marker is presence of an audience. The presence of an audience means that someone that has created an image is also an audience member so the audience does not need to be a teacher of rhetoric to understand.