Visual Rhetoric and Classical Rhetoric
The "canonical approach" to studying visual rhetoric relates visual concepts to the canons of Western classical rhetoric (Inventio, Dispositio, Elocutio, Memoria and Pronuntiatio). In the textbook Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators, its authors list six canons which guide the rhetorical impact of a document: arrangement, emphasis, clarity, conciseness, tone and ethos. According to Kostelnick and Roberts these canons can be defined as:
- Arrangement – “the organization of visual elements so that readers can see their structure”
- Emphasis – making certain parts more prominent than others by changing its size, shape and color.
- Clarity – helps the reader to “decode the message, to understand it quickly and completely”
- Conciseness – “generating designs that are appropriately succinct to a particular situation”
- Tone – tone reveals the designer’s attitude towards the subject matter
- Ethos – earning the trust of the person receiving the message.
These six visual cognates provide an extension of classical rhetoric that can be used as a starting point for analyzing images rhetorically.
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