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last.updated 10.4.05

 

Style and Visual Rhetoric

Purpose

The study of style is an examination of the signs that we choose to use and, to a certain degree, the order in which we choose to present these signs. These choices give us our "voice" and can distinguish us from other rhetors. Yet in some situations, we belong to institutions that describe an expected voice.

We also want to remember that these signs are not always lexical. Other stylistic choices that we make relate to our use of design and images. The purposes of today's lesson is to examine how our decisions about design can implicitly support and/or deliberately challenge certain arguments.

Background

Aristotle and Style

  • Poetics-goes into more depth about the methods of aesthetics in poetry.
  • Ornamental and plain, advocates both depending on the situation (p. 221)
  • Linguistics and style
    • prefers the foreign (p.221)
    • speak the language properlyfor the sake of clarity (p. 231)
  • metaphor as invention (p. 244)

Visual Rhetoric

  • signs-lexical and images; emphasizes images as rational expressions of cultural meaning, as opposed to mere aesthetic consideration (Kress 18)
  • examines multiple types of texts (e.g., paintings, documents, web pages, photographs, movies and television, architecture, sculpture)
  • important for professional writers, esepcially in terms of document design
  • reception and production; making head-way in college composition courses

Anne Wysocki

  • Wysocki teaches at Michigan Technological University in the Humanities Department where she got her Ph.D.
  • previously worked for Apple as a graphic designer
  • teaches courses in composition, technical writing, visual design, and new media
  • scholarship, like the text that we read, challenges writing teachers to consider the visual limitations that often get placed on various texts and textual experiences, as well as the visual potentials for these texts and the texts that student writers produce

Presentation

Yichen, Steven, Jennifer

Discussion

  • What was your experience reading this article?
  • What is Wysocki's defintion of visual rhetoric?
  • Wysocki explicitly explains how the writer's decisions affect ethos, pathos, and logos (pp. 188-189). How does the visual affect these appeals?
  • Kinross and the "rhetoric of neutrality"
    • In reference to the Gill Sans font used for a bus schedule: "a passanger being jostled on a crowded platform on a winter evening, and trying with one eye on the station clockto verify the connections of a given train...; without seirfs and with lines of fairly consistent thickness, it was so 'stripped for action' that as far as glance reading goes, it is the most efficient conveyer of thought" (p. 23)
    • "Univers carried with it an aura: that of system. It was the first typeface whose total set of forms--the varients of weight and expansion or contraction--was conceived at the outset" (p. 23)
  • What does Wysocki say about design principles, such as those proposed by Williams?
  • Which of the activities that Wysocki suggests would you do as a teacher or workplace workshop leader to help writer's consider rhetorical possibilities? For the K-12 teachers, how does Wysocki's pedagogical strategies speak to or against the SOLs?