Teaching Visual Rhetoric in the First-Year Composition Classroom.

For me, visual rhetoric is a focus on the practical, relevant, and functional as opposed to an aesthetic analysis or use of visual elements for beauty. As a rhetorician, I examine the deployment of a visual in terms of its effect, as Sonja Foss explains in “A Rhetorical Schema for the Evaluation of Visual Imagery.” However, I also examine a visual as an ideological artifact. Drawing upon Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright’s definition of images as “both representations and producers of ideologies of their time. . . . [and] factors in relations of power,” visual rhetoric can be an argument for a particular viewpoint instantiated in a visual artifact (72). The interpretation of an image is never a neutral, “natural” act, but rather it reveals entrenched cultural codes, depths of personal knowledge, and ranges of experience. Visual rhetoric needs to be a part of composition courses. Speaking as a compositionist and a rhetorician, John Trimbur suggests that “visual communication constitutes part of the available means of persuasion” and thus should be taught in our writing courses. He relates visual rhetoric to document design, arguing that writing teachers highlight design as “fundamental to composing” (106). In the course he shares with us, “Theory of Visual Design,” students use Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design and Richard Hollis’s Graphic Design: A Concise History to analyze images from a historicized design perspective, but Trimbur brings in the ideological perspective through indepth discussions of examples of documentary photography (111). Although an emphasis on the social production of visual texts pervades all of his chosen texts for his course, Trimbur’s students have time to practice the design principles, and mine do not. Instead, I emphasize reading and interpreting images to reveal something about those images as well as us as interpreters. New Voices