Visual Rhetoric, Images , and Text

Well, I finally fixed my formatting issue on my computer and it's time to play catch up. So, what exactly is visual rhetoric? It can be anything from a photo or drawing to the way you present words in a text. A web comic is a great example of visual rhetoric in multiple ways. The first being the drawing itself. How the artist draws his subject conveys a message. Second would be any text included with the drawing such as a title, caption, or dialog. How the caption or dialog is written and what it says will have a large impact on how the image is perceived and information interpreted.
 How can an image be a text? Again, the font style and lettering is a kind of image. The way letters are written and what color they are can bring about different emotions or ideas. How can images and words work together? The same font or web comic example will work here as well.

In this German web comic you can feel the emotion of the characters through the use of visual rhetoric, even though you may not be able to read the German text. You can also assume what he is saying based on what is visually occurring in the comic as well. Basically he is singing the happy birthday song, and in the third panel he says "It's your birthday, blow the damn candles out because I have stuff to do".

Why We Crave Horor Movies

This essay by Stephen King is another one of my favorites. I've read this essay numerous times already and it never gets old. This is by far one of the best written essays I know. The use of all of the persuasive appeals (Logos, Pathos, and Ethos) makes this essay just grab you by your gut and pull you in. The audience is narrowed to people that watch horror flicks, but still nabs the attention of anyone that may read the first few lines. With an opening line of "I think that we're all mentally ill", how can you miss? I'm not one to read Stephen King novels and even I think this essay should be read to every class from 9th grade up to a students senior year in college. I won't even give a synopsis of the essay, go out and read it, it's just plain good.

Road Warrior

Dave Barry's "Road Warrior" is humor at its' finest. This essay appeals directly to the emotion of the reader through the use of witty metaphors and similes. He rants about the concept of road rage and becomes more and more aggravated as he moves closer to the ridiculous. The transfer from road rage to parking lot rage, and eventually to shopping cart rage, is laughter inducing if not smirk worthy. The target audience can be anyone from people who drive to people that shop at grocery stores. This story, as well as the other essays I've read, tend to have a broad audience.

Slavation

This essay by Langston Hughes is a anecdote of his youth. A young man of 12 years of age was taken to church by his aunt to be saved. He sat and prayed and hoped to see Jesus, but Jesus never came. The boy next to him lied, got up, and walked to the alter claiming he saw the light. Young Langston just sat there, waiting. He didn't want to lie. He deeply wanted to see Jesus and be saved. Jesus still never came. He finally decided to lie, he stood up, and he walked to the alter with the rest of the children. Later that night he cried. He cried in shame for lying to everyone, and never cried again in his life. This story appeals to the character of Langston Hughes. Everyone can relate to a situation in which they had to lie, and more often than not they feel bad about it afterwords. The audience that this story targets seems to be the younger generation, informing them on how bad lying is. It can also speak to the older generations and allowing them to reflect on their past mistakes or lies. Not telling lies if an amazing moral/virtue to adhere to, and the one I personally hold to be the most important.

Toys

Roland Barthes sets up an interesting kaleidoscope for the reader to look through. He shows how the world has changed based on the toys children play with. Not only does he discuss how the different toy reflect each country, but also what materials the toys are made of. He focuses in on French toys in particular. He uses emotional appeals to draw in the read, targeting the senses and referring to the ways things 'use to be'. This makes the reader think back to their childhood and thus ties a link between Barthes' idea and the readers childhood emotions for toys. This essay's audience seems to be that of an older generation. A beckoning call or an appeal to stop the mass production of these emotionless plastic toys, and to revert back to the more creative wooden blocks and toys of old. With regards to this, I agree. The cheap toys made on grandiose scales seems to view children as financial gains rather than what they truly are, just children.

What is an audience?

This is another one of those broad questions with a simple, yet uninformative, answer. The audience is who you are communicating with. This audience can be the person sitting next to you on the bus, the group of employees you are giving a speech to, or the millions of people you hope to have following your twitter posts online. Sometimes you may not even know who your audience is. You may be trying to discuss a medical topic with doctors but end up having religious zealots debating those same issues. Your audience is basically the people that are willing to listen or read what you have to say.

What is a rhetorical situation?

One could answer this by saying "It's any situation that creates a need for a rhetorical response". This question is a rather broad and could be approached in several ways. There are political, forensic, and ceremonial forms of oratory according to Aristotle (Getting sick of this guy yet?). To me any form of communication is a rhetorical situation. If you have to display an idea or pose a question to someone you are constantly thinking about how you can communicate effectively. You wonder about your vocabulary, your sentence structure, and word order. If you can't clearly get your point across then might as well have just been sucking your thumb the entire time rather than talking.