njeanne’s blog

May 20-22

Introduction to Part Three

The Rhetoric of Design

VRDW: 225-26

Handa introduces the reader to a new “realm of design” in the digital world. This arrangement often combines both words and images. This includes various fonts of color, digital photos, and clip art. Part Three provides a new way of thinking about design functioning as rhetoric. For teachers, this opens a world of graphic communication and a new way to look at rhetoric in composition studies. Today, many students have created a personal Web page, but they need to understand how rhetorical principles can also apply in the development of writing using visual and digital texts.

Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design

Richard Buchanan: 228-59

Design appeared as a “distinct discipline only in the twentieth century…” This, however, may be traced back to an ancient world of art disciplines. Aristotle had a unique understanding of “differences among all of the arts…” He called this “poetic science” a term derived from the Greek term “making.” The relationship of rhetoric and the arts of “making,” and the understanding of rhetoric as a cultural art was brought about by the translation of Aristotle’s Poetic in various languages in the sixteenth century. Interestingly, Leonardo da Vinci’s “speculations on mechanical devices” expressed his poetic and visual imagination.

The ability to look at rhetoric in an artistic way has helped me create and submit a related Thesis Proposal.

njeanne’s blog

VRDW: May 6-8

Part Two: (131-222)

Page 133 introduces us to a condensed view of this section of the textbook, with invitations to chapters that draw interest to the readers. For example, Arnheim gives us a sample of various images that function as rhetoric. He discusses meaning of visual images and when printed in association with words offer “a linguistic message” that is both “denotative and connotative. In other words, rhetoric is easily adapted to images, and Arnheim notes that cartoons can speak with amplification in ways “realistic pictures cannot” (133-34).

Arnheim comments on Scott McCloud’s cartoons and how they “amplify ideas” and ways that help the reader to understand how cartoon images are not “frivolous forms of drawings,” but they are serious forms of communication, and in fact show hybrid rhetoric that can be introduced to composition students. McCloud’s “The Rhetoric of the Image” proves that text along with images is a hybrid of composition that could be effectively used in composition classes (195-208).

Writing, Technology and Teens

PewResearch Center Publications

Although Professor Rhodes posted this, it is not required reading, but I found this article informative in researching teens, and their responses to technology of the Internet and communication through text-messaging as not writing. The evidence gathered is somewhat of a “digital age paradox” because, although teens spend a great deal of time composing texts, they do not think that much of the material they create electronically is real writing. Teens also prefer writing for an audience because it “motivates” them to write well. They also do not believe that writing with a computer elevates the quality of their writing (1-4). Online http://pewresearch.org/pubs/808/writing-technology-and-teens.