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.
Read more about this topic: Visual Rhetoric
Famous quotes containing the words visual, rhetoric and/or classical:
“Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Classical art, in a word, stands for form; romantic art for content. The romantic artist expects people to ask, What has he got to say? The classical artist expects them to ask, How does he say it?”
—R.G. (Robin George)