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.
