Visual Rhetoric: How Visuals Communicate to Readers
Hypertext visual rhetoric is the language analysis tool needed for the future. The more we move our lives online, the more we must reinforce the hybridization of our literacy to include visual and verbal elements. Digital writing rhetoric is an ongoing conversation between old and new principles. This represents the interactive and interconnected nature of digital communication in hypertext form. It is the conversation, not the statement, question, or response but the whole union of it all actively at play. This makes this medium exciting because it moves as quickly as our brains form arguments, changing the outcome and current conclusion, which will in turn be recreated, remastered, and reproduced. The internet has strengthened the adage that nothing is new, only recreated.
At times, the visual overcommunicates and loses its balance with the rest of the content as seen in this Instagram reel example by creator @esquire.sports (not affiliated with the publication) critiquing the ineffective use of graphics by sports television broadcasters.
In My Modern Media Era
When I think of my blog’s visual characteristics, I see myself as stuck in the past. Two of my first professional jobs were writing and page composition for local newspapers. I think of the principles of journalism and newspaper values and subconsciously apply them here. It leads to a stripped, more serious (stale) production that doesn’t take the online medium to its fullest potential. I want to produce respectable material, and I feel reducing the visual clutter and focusing on a clean, professional presentation of written concepts is superior. This approach fails to elaborate or evolve my ideas beyond their rhetorical seedling status into a bigger conversation. The era I grew up in warned sharing on the Internet is a personal security threat. This implicit, dated bias has made me reticent when the current climate calls on us to use our voices to contribute so we can keep building more.
Writing these blogs for a college course and not as a professional venture (not that I have had success with this previously) can make it feel like I’m expressing myself in an echo chamber. The desirable goal of having a readership that promotes commentary and reaction is hard to satisfy. One way I can attempt to interweave my content with the greater World Wide Web would be to increase the user agency through exciting hyperlinks to related and multimedia content.
Visual Rhetoric Lets Me Say More
The encouragement to turn layout designs on their head is inspiring. Controversial or unexpected layouts can draw new attention to the content or refresh the audience base. For example, many cooks turn to the Internet for recipes, and many blogs offer hundreds of words of text to tell you all about recipes’ history, use, advantages, and disadvantages. A fresh way to present these blogs would be to keep the recipe present and visible in a side panel for the whole page scroll or perhaps the recipe can be at the beginning of the blog entry.
With the information from our readings and these reflections, I am looking for new ways to add extra interest to my blog posts through unexpected images that may not directly speak to the text but instead elaborate further on the points made. Font choice and subheading usage could help make my blog more navigable. Hopefully, doing this can provoke dialogue or at least interaction. What qualities of web layout and visual design add to your experience of the visual rhetoric of blogs? Do you prefer a blog that lets you bounce around without losing the point of the text?
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