Visual rhetoric and composition

Despite this focus on new media, the inclusion of visual rhetoric in composition studies is distinct from a media theory of composition, though the two are obviously related. Visual rhetoric focuses on the rhetorical nature of all visual texts while new media tends to focus on electronic mediums.

Background

Visual rhetoric or “visual modes of representation” has been present in composition (college writing) courses for decades but only as a complementary component “for writing assignments and instructions” since it was considered as “a less sophisticated, less precise mode of conveying semiotic content than written language.” Nevertheless, many experts in composition studies, including Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, and Jason Palmeri, draw a parallel between “alphabetic writing and the visual arts” because both entail an engagement “in composing as a recursive process of discovery – a process in which composers [or in this context, students]…explore, transform, and rearrange materials (words, images, objects).”

The call to include non-linguistic practices within the field of rhetoric officially occurred in 1970 at the National Conference on Rhetoric. Some scholars opposed the inclusion of visual rhetorics arguing that it detracted from public discourse. Other scholars, such as Kenneth Burke and Douglas Ehninger, were proponents of including visual elements into the discipline of rhetoric. In 1994, the New London Group, consisting of ten scholars from Australia, Great Britain, and the United States, developed the term multiliteracies, which describes the rapid growth of communication channels and platforms through which people from all around the world design and exchanges various contents of information despite the differences in languages and cultures. In educational contexts, multiliteracies suggest “a different kind of pedagogy, one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes." Thus, visual literacy or visual rhetoric specifically applies to Composition Studies through the study and focus on various forms of texts expressed in different mediums. Liza Long, Amy Minervini, and Joel Gladd define visual rhetoric as "the means by which visual imagery can be used to achieve a communication goal such as to influence people’s attitudes, opinions, and beliefs." The writer employs knowledge of function, form, and purpose to create the visual text; while the audience or reader constructs meaning from the parts as they contribute to the complete piece. Composition is a technology. From the beginning, the writer employed symbolic representation of images made with tools on a medium. With the advent of multimodal and digital texts incorporating visuals and traditional text, visual rhetoric has a home in Composition Studies. Notably, multimodal texts imply an “interconnection among other modes” such as audio, linguistic, visual, gestural, and spatial, whereas visual texts include “images, page layouts, screen formats,” etc.