Blog 3: Visual Rhetoric and Visual Communication

For the next few paragraphs, a comparative review will be given of George’s “From analysis to Design: Visual Communication” and Hocks’s Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments.”

George and Hocks seem to align themselves on some of the principles of the New London Group’s Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. The reason being is that they stressed a shift from the traditional design of literacy.  Traditional writing composition may include in its curricula new designs of visual compositions.  For example in Boikhuto superimposition of three maps on top of each other to get across his point that pre-colonial Africa cannot be recovered unique qualities of visual compositions (211).  George and Hocks might conclude that through use of visual rhetoric or communication, Boikhuto strengthens his compositions on the effects on colonialism of Postcolonial Africa.

According to Hocks, visual digital rhetoric pertains to “a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audience and institutional contexts, but it focuses on the multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communications and information technologies” (632).  Hocks also explains how audience stance—audience participation with online texts, transparency—how online documents relate or borrow from visual images found in conventional texts and hybridity—the ways in which online documents combine and construct visual designs (632). 

There is a continuous interaction with online materials between creator and audience. The numerous interactive softwares that are made available thus reach a wider audience, as a result of the Internet.  At the time when the Internet came about, there weren’t multiple modalities that were available.    Hocks noticed there are shifts in the design of web pages with new modalities that are created online.  In the same token web designs are creating own designs similar (or structure) to monitor order for web designs.  In other words, it could be understood that web pages have a format or to create the pages with their own guidelines.  Nonetheless they are less restrictive as the guidelines associated with printed texts.  Therefore, interactive softwares with respect to visual designs are in fact purposeful just as written texts have proven to be.

 Mary Hocks in Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments

views visual rhetoric as a transformative process of the design. Visual rhetoric or strategies is useful in the art getting across the information that is being communicated.  The “art” of persuasion is increasingly improving and resigning itself with respect to hypertexts and multimedia.  Hocks tackles the notion that visual rhetoric, which is similar to visual communication in Georges piece, as being an important discourse.  Both Hocks and George agree that the visual and the verbal are difficult to separate because hypertexts are interactive with incorporating visuals and audio together (629).  With the introduction of new technologies Hocks states that their needs to be a new definition for what is to considered writing. Unlike George, Hocks is not trying to dodge the issue as to whether or not writing is to be considered a form of visual communication or rhetoric.

Diana George in “From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing insinuates that the ­potential value of visual communication for example in composition writing is limitless.  George highlights that there is a debacle as to whether or not to considered for instance written text as a form of visual communication or rhetoric, albeit its role as a part of composition course.  She states that this is a healthy tug of war, henceforth, dodges this discussion. Nonetheless, she strives for a working understanding of the relationship of incorporating the visual communication in the classroom. George distinguishes herself from Hocks in that she will argue that the visual and the verbal or the same, are read and composed in the same way or have the same status in the tradition of communication instruction (213).

George brings about the notion that the way texts were written and structured on paper seemed trivial. However, greater importance has been recently given to text layouts. To a great extent, texts are design differently because of illustrations that can be found in children books, or flyers are posters, that designers in order to create meaning for their readers include images so that readers can interact more with texts.  According to George, computers have made it easier for students to prepare a composition that fits with conventional writing style.  George also points out that “technology, desktop publishing has moved writing instruction into the world of design…because literacy instruction in terms designs have to draw upon available knowledge and, at the same time, transform that knowledge/those forms as we redesign”  (223). 

What can be inferred from this is that visual rhetoric or communication is a form of   literacy and that it has taken on a structure for itself. This structure may borrow features from conventional writing or photography or from other genres—transparency (650).  Hocks and George would believe that there is a place for visual rhetoric in the classroom because its purpose is to help composer’s convey meaning effectively.   

Hocks and George might also agree that the visual strengthens the rhetoric for the visual argument.  Student composers are eventually using the available technologies as redesign of the conventional structure of writing to an entirely bastardized version of conventional writing.  More so technology at that time was not as advance as it is today. George is predicting that the future of technology and writing when they meet will create a revolution. In this respect George’s prediction is accurate. Writing composition is in anyway bastardizing the English composition. Once educators understand that there is a form and structure to visual communication. Just as a blank page is to the composition writer so is the storyboard form to the computer literate.  There is a lot of planning and structure per se in storyboards that composition teachers can't ignore as being sophisticated see the video below on How to Create a Storyboard. 

Hybrid forms then might have been in fact difficult twenty years ago when most writing and responding to text were asynchronous and teachers weren’t convinced of the design and structure of web interfaces.    Now things have change tremendously.  Composition pedagogy in respect to new technologies, however, belong in the in composition classroom as are yet still a lot more difficult. As Hocks would argue that the visual design has motivated and engaged readers in the complex web of text. I would also agree with Hock that for the process in conventional writing is important. Therefore, so too in understanding digital rhetoric to the electronic class-rooms needs to be expanded and an appreciation for the analytical process of creating new vision of knowledge online is important (646). For instance, there is an interaction with between the viewer and Walt Disney's with Mickey Mouse © All Aboard—there is a personification of the train.





The train struggles to make it over the hill and this is metaphoric of life’s challenges— its filled with many hills and there are going to be times that individuals will roll back down the hill. Metaphor and personification are elements in writing that visual rhetoric can convey and improve interaction among readers and their audience. There is the environmental case and industrialization statement that is being made.

What is being taken away from both George and Hocks is that visual communication or visual rhetoric albeit verbal, visual and/or in written form will maximize communication instruction— likewise, for persuasion through multimedia. If they come together, then there would be harmony with new technologies, the role of visual communication or rhetoric, and writing composition. There would be a place where the verbal can coexist with the visual and that is made possible with the Internet.  The determining factor is the way people process information best be it auditory or visual.  This notion however, ignores other learning styles.