Students can also benefit from opportunities to write about the visual as part of a more materially complex and paratextually informed situation, that is, as signs appearing in grocery stores (Dickinson and Maugh), gardens (Lambert and Martinez), homes (Tange), suburbs (Robbins), and a great variety of public and private spaces.
Drawing extensively on the tradition of the ancients, the first chapter of our collection, Nancy Allen’s “Seeing Rhetoric: A Foundational Approach,” highlights the complementarities between verbal and visual modes of communication. Using a variety of professional examples to support her explanation, Allen catalogues the visual applications of the rhetorical appeals, canon, and triangle and provides a solid working model for writing teachers who wish to introduce students to the elements of visual rhetoric.
“Mediated Memory: The Language of Memorial Space” describes how L. J. Nicoletti’s students studied a site that was of special interest to them and then designed and wrote a text justifying the creation of a new memorial. Nicoletti focuses on the fourth canon of rhetoric by deconstructing the “seeming rhetorical sanctity” of this architectural form and asks students to consider issues such as rhetorical purpose, context, and audience in light of memorial architecture, as well as the goals of inclusiveness (remembrance) and originality. Developed in the aftermath of 9/11, her approach demonstrates how writing projects incorporating the visual can resonate in students’ lives.
Barbara Worthington and Deborah Rard’s “Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers: Using Documentary Film in Classroom Instruction” describes the authors’ film-based methods for teaching the principles of rhetorical analysis to first-year students. By thoughtfully viewing a documentary containing a narrative of a fatal drunk-driving accident, students develop awareness of rhetoric’s terms and functions. The chapter includes an analysis of student discussions of visual arguments arising from and directed at viewers in different socioeconomic contexts.
C. Richard King’s chapter, “Envisioning Justice: Racial Metaphors, Political Movements, and Critical Pedagogy,” describes an advanced writing unit on race, social justice, and culture. Asserting that white supremacy is a “structured field of vision no less than systems of economic, political, and social relations,” King examines how “metaphors, analogies, and juxtapositions” buttress racialization. His chapter also highlights the complexities raised by the images, slogans, and advertisements of social organizations invoking victimization.
Jane Davis wrote “Seeing the Unspeakable: Emmett Till and American Terrorism” in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the lynching of Till, a 14-year-old African-American who was gruesomely tortured and murdered by white men for whistling at one of their wives. Horrific photographs of Till maimed in his coffin brought home the reality of racist violence and outraged people across the United States, helping give force to the nascent Civil Rights Movement. Davis illustrates both the power of visual media and the role of images in perpetuating and combating racism.
“A Study of Photographs of Iran: Postcolonial Inquiry into the Limits of Visual Representation,” by Iraj Omidvar, notes that in the United States visual representations of Muslims generally and of Iranians specifically have been ubiquitous—and negative—since 9/11. Yet countering these visual stereotypes without resorting to an objectivist stance requires a commitment to teacher-student dialogue in the spirit of Socratic elenchos. Omidvar suggests that teachers and students trace the roots of racist images by engaging in research designed to illuminate the material bases of stereotyping.
Yong-Kang Wei’s chapter, “Ethos on the Web: A Cross-Cultural Approach,” highlights differences between rhetorics of “East” and “West.” After identifying key concepts of classical Western rhetoric and providing an overview of classical Chinese rhetoric as it occurs in speech, architecture, landscape, and document design, Wei demonstrates how Chinese hypertext reflects its cultural and rhetorical traditions. His chapter has served as a provocative starting point for courses addressing cross-cultural professional communication.
Jean Darcy describes in “Christopher Columbus’s Maps: Visualizing Discovery” a project exemplifying Mitchell’s analysis of the verbal-visual relation. Her assignments for courses, from beginning to advanced, require students not only to use maps and textual sources in extrapolating the critical thinking processes of Columbus in his “New World” voyages but also to investigate their own methods of learning and knowing. Her original assignment is open to a variety of artifacts and could be adapted easily to technical writing syllabi.
Alyssa O’Brien describes in “Drawn to Multiple Sides: Making Arguments Visible” an assignment for which students choose images and create texts to explore alternative viewpoints. The Feature Articles Multiple Sides Project elicits from students rhetorical analyses, new perspectives, innovative approaches to visual layout, and stylistic experiments in voice. This chapter provides examples of student writing and offers a companion webpage.
Ryan Jerving’s rubric “Thirteen Ways to Read a Black-and-White Photograph” identifies key compositional elements in black-and-white photography and highlights their potential influences on interpretation. Jerving also presents an activity that will help students of writing develop a rhetorical appreciation for the photograph as a designed object by considering the key issues of its subject matter, camera work, scene of representation, and institutional location.
Mark Mullen’s chapter, “Collapsing Floors and Disappearing Walls: Teaching Visual and Cultural Intertexts in Electronic Games,” recommends that teachers import electronic games as objects of analysis into the writing classroom. While preparing teachers for the challenges that can attend analysis of this genre in typical wired classrooms, Mullen explains how the visual elements of games can require interpretive strategies as complex as those applied to traditional literary texts. His analysis of American McGee’s Alice demonstrates that electronic games can be sophisticated texts suited to college-level analysis.
Kristin Walker Pickering’s “Revising for Activity Purposes: Improving Document Design for Reader-Oriented Activities” considers the relevance of activity theory to the human factors of website design. Focusing on the effective integration of text and graphics from a user-design perspective, Pickering discusses work her students have undertaken in revising workplace documents. To illustrate how complex the analysis of users and stakeholders can be as well as the usefulness of activity theory in facilitating analysis, Walker focuses on the efforts of a student to make a state government website more readable.
In the Western tradition, the value of sense data to inquiry was a driving question 2,600 years ago among the presocratics. Heraclitus concluded that “sight tells falsehoods” (McKirahan 118) although the eyes are yet “more accurate witnesses than the ears” (119). Parmenides claimed that mortals were benighted because they accepted as reality what they saw; Anaxogoras’s paradox of color illustrated this same point. But Empedocles articulated an ancient rationale for triangulation, enjoining the inquirer to allow the mind to question the certainties of the senses, and the senses to destabilize the mind’s cherished beliefs:
Look with every means of apprehension, in whatever way each thing is clear, Not holding any sight more in trust than [what comes] through hearing, Or loud-sounding hearing above the things made clear by the tongue, And do not hold back trust in any of the other members, Whatever way there is a channel for understanding, but Understanding each thing in whatever way it is clear. (McKirahan 235)
Empedocles’s point was not to privilege any one of the senses, but to utilize each as fully as possible. From this perspective, an interest in the visual and in the study of alternative theories, methodologies, tools, and worldviews that such an interest entails, would advantage the inquirer-writer. We believe that by cultivating new approaches to thinking, knowing, and communicating, our students may find themselves making a habit of the wonder that formed the daily diet of those remarkable inquirers who puzzled through reality in a less