A good source for finding examples of the appeal through ethos is personal websites. In a recent Wired article about websites for presidential candidates Kerry and Bush, Adam Penenberg commented, “In the end, it may not matter what kind of information appears on the candidates’ websites, as long as they have a cool design” (1). He referred to the results from a 2002 Stanford study on website credibility and reported, “Nearly half of the study’s participants—about 46 percent—rated a site’s credibility based primarily on its design or look” (2). Personal websites are developed to illustrate and sometimes to promote the author’s ethos or image, which is presented first through the visuals that meet us when we open the appropriately named Splash page or the homepage. The colors and graphics chosen and the sizes of graphics and words create an immediate impression of the personal image, thus carrying the appeal through ethos. To learn more about this use of visual rhetoric, students can investigate a variety of personal websites, such as those for professionals, their favorite entertainers, and some contemporaries whom they may or may not know (if an appropriate website for a professional is a little difficult to find, a good one to check is <http://www.a2.com>, the site for a marketing consultant). After analyzing a variety of sites, students might try to design their own personal website, on a computer or on paper. Their experiences analyzing the ethos of other people’s sites should encourage them to think closely about the items they add to their own site, how they design the layout, and what messages these images and the design convey to viewers.
Pathos. Visuals are most often associated with pathos, the appeal to our emotions. Photos can evoke sympathy, and films can frighten. For instance, television news programs were prohibited from showing film of flag-draped coffins being unloaded from transport planes returning from Iraq because of the dismay that viewing large numbers of dead soldiers might have on the public. Such a focus on the human cost of war could weaken viewers’ support for the war effort. In contrast, images of the twin towers destroyed on September 11 are shown to arouse our anger toward our perceived enemies and reinforce our fear of what could happen to anyone. Of course, visual representations aren’t always connected to international issues. Through their joyous colors, balloons tied to a mailbox signal a celebration at a nearby household.
Visuals and the emotions they invoke can be put to positive use in building arguments. It is pathos, the appeal to our emotions, that is credited with adding motivation to persuasive discourse. While good reasons and the credibility of the author work to convince us of the rightness of a cause, we are often swayed more by our passions or emotions (Corbett 34), and it is emotion that inspires us to take action (99). A group of medical students at the University of Michigan has appealed visually to the emotions of their institution’s policymakers through “photovoice,” a technique used in “advocacy efforts from China to Flint to San Francisco for more than a decade” (Rueter E1). The medical students photograph patients in ways that emphasize the patients’ unmet needs and use the photos in presentations made to medical center administrators and community leaders. These students also used photovoice to argue their own need to work in outpatient clinics serving people without health insurance. As a result, medical school officials are now forging a partnership with such a clinic, in which interested students can do rotations, learning about loan-forgiveness programs and low-cost clinics.
Rhetorical Canon
In addition to providing useful tools for presenting our ideas to others, rhetorical theory also provides help for guiding us in the development of those ideas into coherent essays, articles, and presentations. Classical theory breaks the process into five steps, which together are referred to as the rhetorical canon. Each step can be illustrated through visuals to help us understand the procedure more clearly and incorporate it into our work.
Invention (inventio). We’ve all suffered from paralysis of the blank page. Before we can present a persuasive discussion, we need something to say, but what? We need to develop ideas that will help to make our case. In rhetorical theory, that process is called invention, but of course we don’t just make up imaginary facts, as the term may imply. What we invent, or develop, are topics (topoi) related to our purpose. Visual representation can be especially helpful with this step of rhetoric.
Because it is hard to come up with ideas, writing teachers have developed heuristic strategies, such as brainstorming, to stimulate our thinking, but we don’t all think in the same ways. Some people rely on manipulating language to generate ideas whereas others rely more on the right side of the brain, which is associated with our visual processes. For these individuals, visual heuristics and the overall process of visual thinking can help spark creative ideas. We can, for example, create mind maps, matrices, storyboards, and sketches as we develop our way of approaching a problem. Through these visual thinking activities, we may discover relations among the parts of a problem and
use them to create new directions in our thinking. When students in my classes are developing ideas, with the goal of preparing a recommendation report, I ask them to create visual representations of the problem as part of the development process. In fact, I ask them to create two or three representations so that they get beyond the more linear matrices and flow charts to sketches and visuals based on freer types of associations. One year, my students decided to investigate the problem of insects in their residence halls and to send recommendations to the housing staff. In preparation, they created idea maps and sketches to represent their thought processes. Representations such as these give students a wide range of ideas to draw on that can help them see connections among issues as they begin writing (Figure 2).
The lawyer mentioned earlier, who described using visuals in his court presentations, also uses visuals to aid his invention process in preparing arguments. While thinking about a case, he makes a literal or schematic drawing of the scene or situation to help him develop a general approach; for some cases, he also hires a photographer to help him get a clearer view of a setting. These visual representations help him to clarify and to organize his thinking on a case, to absorb the whole, and to see relations among the parts. He feels that the visuals translate relations over time into relations in space so they can be comprehended and evaluated more easily. Visuals, he believes, can cut through the murkiness sometimes created by words and help him see features of an issue more clearly (Steingold). (Figure 3 shows paper mill workers using graphic models in a similar way, to help them understand a production problem.)
Scientists have long used the Internet to exchange information. The advent of browsers added the power to exchange visuals as well as text, and the World Wide Web has relatively recently become a valuable resource for many of us seeking information. A great deal of information is available there on almost any topic, and it’s easily accessible to anyone with a computer connection. Online search tools have become tools of invention, and these tools are themselves becoming more visual. Not only can they display graphics, but search engines such as Vivisimo and Grokker show the results of a search as a visual representation rather than as a list. Results are sorted into categories and then mapped into a display, for instance, as a set of labeled geometric shapes. The software uses a combination of linguistic and statistical analyses to determine categories that fit the subject matter and then maps search results visually into colorful circles of information that allow a viewer to zoom in for detail. An article about these new search tools describes a search for “Paris Hilton” as an example. A textual search tool like Google would return a long list that includes items on a celebrity named Paris Hilton as well as on a Hilton Hotel in Paris. The visual search tools group the responses into categories, such as booking sites, maps, celebrities, etc., making it easier for us to select a circle with the information we need (Bergstein).
Arrangement (dispositio). The visual features of a page are more than simply print conventions; they are full of meaning. The headings and indentations of a page layout indicate a hierarchy of meaning, the order of importance for the points being made. For example, headings in the center are more important than those on the side, and items in a list are related. Through arrangement of information on a page, we