Reading Response
Prompt 2: Drawing on at least two of the readings, explain what is rhetorical about the visual turn.
In the introductory chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle defines rhetoric as “the technique of discovering the persuasive aspects of any given subject-matter.” Rhetoric, as Aristotle defines it, could be applied to nearly any medium, any object, anything that communicates a meaning or attempts to persuade a viewer, reader, hearer, or observer. So what is rhetorical about the visual turn?
The visual element has always been a factor in the readability and communicative properties of text. Paragraph breaks, margins and the like are the modern-day examples, but I can only assume that visual properties were equally important to the scribes who painstakingly handwrote script (often with elaborate embellishments) and even to writers farther in the past. Why are visual elements so important when constructing text on a page? Because they help to communicate meaning, making the message of the text more available to the readers. This principle holds true with the translation of text to the web; however, now technology has made it possible to integrate visuals as a more active feature, and today’s internet viewers/readers expect to be able to visually navigate a page within an instant and to easily locate and collect information, making the visual presentation of information at least as important as the words themselves.
As Madeline Sorapure explains through her discussion of Flash, today’s viewers are looking for a visual accessibility. She states that “Flash has been used on the Web mostly for multimodal composing because of its capabilities for bringing together text, image, animation, sound, and video and for outputting these multimodal combinations in relatively small files” (413). More than ever before, visuals have become an integral element of any communication. Technology has made multimodal communication far easier to achieve than ever before, and today’s viewers have come to expect certain visual elements as a part of any information exchange on the web. As such, the visual has become highly rhetorical, as viewers will instantaneously judge the credibility, professionalism, and reliability of a website based on how well it conforms to their visual expectations.
Patricia Sullivan mentions this in her discussion of why people are so motivated to stay within the restrictions of “safe visual rhetoric,” stating that “Web pages can be spaces that may tell prospective employers more about their job candidates than the job candidates intend” (105). The underlying idea of Sullivan’s statement evidences the rhetoric of the visual – from the design of a web page, employers (and anyone else for that matter) glean information from which they can make assumptions about the person who designed it. This alone proves how rhetorical the visual aspect of a webpage actually is – separate from the content or information presented on the web page, just the look of the page can suggest expertise (or lack thereof) by how well it conforms to visual expectations.
The visual turn is rhetorical in its very nature – visual elements communicate and persuade, whether intentionally or not.
–C.Crawford
