Visual Rhetoric: Constructing and Analyzing Readability of Text and Image

Above is a video that also contributes to the reading for this week.

In the article, “awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs.” by Anne Frances Wysocki, she argues that it is necessary to rethink the limitations placed on the materials we use to communicate as a means of making previously unavailable means available. Wysocki encourages us to question how and why there are constraints placed on the materials we use to communicate. She then invites us to examine the execution of space in text by using the name of her work as an example. She asks: does it read “a way with words” or “away with words”?

I believe Wysocki is trying to tell her audience is that for us to compose texts and have them work as we intended them, we must teach students to always consider space in how they came to understand it and hiw it can be used going forward. Wysocki goes on to express how image and text are inseparable. Wysocki claims that the text possesses a visual components required for communication. Wysocki claims that our definition of what an image can be is far too broad because there are different factors that can give an image its purpose and meaning. Wysocki’s article is important because it furthers the discussion on the dual utilization of image and text. Fully understanding the duality between visual and verbal teaching helps one see that the relationship is very complimentary of each other, instead of favoring one over the other.

The materials she speaks on change based on context, place, and time. It is important to note because when these components change, the message undoubtedly changes as well. Learning capabilities are evolving with each passing semester and now teachers have the opportunity to integrate the new mediums the students are introducing into the classroom and utilize the rhetorical features in them. Wysocki leaves us thinking of what we have made unavailable in terms of ways to communicate. By making the term ‘words’ and ‘images’ so inhibited and one-dimensional, forms of communication will forever be stuck stereotypical labels. It opens for the discussion to view images as just a valid form of communication as words itself.