Charles Kostelnick, who has written extensively on the history and theory of visual design, details a rubric for visual design in “A Systematic Approach to Visual Language in Business Communication.” Recently, he describes in “Melting-Pot Ideology, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Emergence of Graphical Conventions: The Statistical Atlases of the United States, 1874–1925” a history of graphics beginning in the early nineteenth century, when the U.S. government published statistical atlases of census data on immigrants. The designers of these atlases developed conventions that still influence the graphical presentation of data.
Jacques Bertin applies a semiotic approach to the creation of graphs, maps, and diagrams. He differentiates between monosemic systems, where meanings are specified and clearly understood, i.e., the graphic meaning, and polysemic systems, in which readers choose from a group of similar signs, making signification comparatively subjective (2). His discussion of size, value, texture, color, orientation, and shape in graphic design provide a useful framework for analysis and discussion of visual artifacts.
Edward R. Tufte, coiner of the term chartjunk, complicates the discussion of graphic displays in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by addressing the dangers of uncritically accepting visual representations of data. Likewise, Carlos Salinas reprimands technical communicators for approaching the visual primarily as a vehicle for disseminating truth and for failing to exploit its many potentials, especially for cultural critique. His article “Technical Rhetoricians and the Art of Configuring Images” describes Punk Ska’s 1998 anti-Nike website, which reconfigures the swoosh as a “modified swastika” and adds the slogan “Nike: Made by Kids in Sweat Shops” (178) to illustrate how multimedia texts can be reread.
Donna Kienzler applies in “Visual Ethics” general ethical principles to the selection of material for visual displays in professional communication documents as well as to their design and identifies criteria for evaluating visual data. Nancy Allen’s “Ethics and Visual Rhetorics: Seeing’s Not Believing Anymore” provides instruction and examples for the ethical construction of visuals, and lists visual rhetoric sources that would be helpful to professional communicators working on visual design. David critiques the ethics of the elaborate visuals placed in corporate annual reports, asserting that the “reports” are mythmaking documents rather than objective summaries of the year’s activities (“Mythmaking”).
Among those writers who have lamented the slow incorporation of a broader rhetorical focus into technical communication curricula are Richards and David. We point out in “Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web” that the widely circulated advice to avoid color in technical documents unless for logical purposes is anachronistic, for color obviously commands the attention of readers of technical information in hybrid documents, both in print and on the Web. Thus, we encourage colleagues to reconsider the assumptions that the decorative is irrelevant to students of technical and writing, or that attempts to study the decorative are doomed to be “non-rigorous” (Helmers and Hill 2), and to conduct research into the pathos of technical writing. We agree with Helmers’ assessment that theories of visual rhetoric provide opportunities to “unhing[e] the traditional dynamic of pleasure/expressiveness and function/persuasiveness in favor of a dialogic, transactional viewing” (65).
Pedagogical Approaches
Several books have been published recently that respond to the burgeoning interest in visual and verbal intersections in the writing classroom. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers’s anthology, Defining Visual Rhetorics, offers a rich menu of visual genres useful to teachers and scholars in rhetoric and communication disciplines; the text has generated thoughtful discussion in our graduate document design courses, and this introductory chapter has cited numerous essays from the text. Charles Kostelnick and David D. Roberts’s textbook Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators covers visual theory and application for advanced college students in business and technical majors. Nancy Allen’s Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance constructs a broadly interdisciplinary context for the visual. Donald and Christine McQuade’s Seeing and Writing 2 provides provocative images, texts, and assignments for students of first-year writing. Christine Alfano and Alyssa O’Brien’s Envision: Persuasive Writing in a Visual World teaches these same students to analyze and to understand visual texts as essential to effective writing. And Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchick, and Cynthia Selfe’s Picturing Texts provides suggestions for students evaluating and producing visual artifacts.
In our classrooms, when we have offered discussions and assignments invoking painting, architecture, sculpture, and photography, most students have accepted these subjects readily. When creating writing assignments and discussion topics for classes in composition, rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and professional and technical writing, we have supplied students with materials from art books and from museum websites. Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception offers chapters on the elements of visual composition and contains many examples that could be of use to teachers contemplating assignments along similar lines.
Titles of books on women, both as artists and as models, are included in David’s article “Investitures of Power.” Paintings of women by the Pre-Raphaelites (who worshipped female beauty while treating their beautiful wives and models carelessly), as well as other well-known portraits and their contexts, will interest students, as we have found, and may motivate them to bring in favorite reproductions of their own. Assignments drawing on the history of portraiture style might ask students to find family pictures, old and new, in order to analyze the expressions and configurations of sitters, or to examine the styles of portraiture in different cultural and historic contexts. Figure 3 presents very different photographic representations of couples from the mid-eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries; these juxtapositions suggest that popular styles of intimate portraiture are influenced by artistic conventions.
Helpful sources for teachers conducting discussions and creating writing assignments around photography are Lemagny and Ruille’s A History of Photography: Social and Cultural Perspectives and The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall, both of which present a history of photographic styles. And many early images now are available on the Web. As Institutional Repositories (such as Emory University’s
Library-of-Congress-funded Meta-Archive of Southern Culture) go online, students with access to the Internet will have virtually limitless accessibility to the gamut of photographic genres. In addition to researching such archives, students might bring in pictures from their own “galleries” to analyze.
Recently, one of us taught a special-topics first-year composition course focusing on visual rhetoric. Students discussed and wrote about images including those that appeared in traveling photography exhibits, which many postsecondary institutions, including our own, house regularly. The WebCT post appearing in Figure 4 reproduces text written by Katie Jezghani after a