Visual Rhetoric
(Prompt 2: what’s rhetorical about the visual turn? Sorry to be late.)
Maybe I’m misreading the prompt, but I think the visual is rhetorical to the extent that the writer/composer makes it so. Shouldn’t an effective rhetorical act include some preliminary judgments about what the issue is that’s being addressed (stasis), and then be enacted in a particular way to address the problem for a certain audience?
I know that in some ways that’s a pretty narrow definition of rhetorical acts–some acts are decidedly rhetorical even though they’re puked onto a billboard or canvas or website without much thoughtful determination of audience–but it’s what I kept thinking when reading Sullivan’s piece. Toward the end, for instance, she asks us to “realize that the Web in many ways is more inviting to the theatrical graphics” (118), which is certainly true in a technical, “Look at all our possibilities!” sort of way, but insufficient if we’re trying to theorize the visual as a valid rhetorical strategy. Using “theatrical graphics” just plain isn’t going to be the right choice for all rhetorical situations, and sometimes other “safe” choices are decidedly more important than using the visual options we have. Yes, gaudiness is culturally determined by the powerful, rich, white, etc. But yikes, don’t we need to teach students how to prosper in that world, how to pass as someone who will be perceived as thoughtful and professional and stylish, at least a lot of the time?
Really, it’s the opportunity for these thoughtful rhetorical choices that gets me most excited about visual possibilities when teaching writing. Frankly, in a lot of ways I’m kind of skeptical about asking students to produce visual texts in a writing class–I see one of my responsibilities as helping students have a set of tools to know what the heck to do when they’re given writing projects in their next 3 (or more) years of school. I think I reacted in the opposite way that Sorapure intended when she described the “rhetorically odd” nature of writing code, in that its only “audience” is a machine (424). Yikes–isn’t that teaching them the opposite of what I want to teach, that consideration of audience can infuse the act of writing more than they realize?
But in a fruitful way, I can imagine teaching students to produce visual texts–and yes, even code–in a way that is firmly rooted in a rhetorical task. That’s my job, of course, as the instructor. (“What do you want your colors, say, to imply? And to whom? In what situation? When might it be interpreted differently? Are you okay with that? How might you revise?”) But I don’t think students are going to instinctively, magically gain all kinds of transferable knowledge just because they made a brochure or a Flash project. They’ve been making freaking brochures for years; it’s only going to be meaningful if they shape it in reaction to a rhetorical problem.
-Kyle
