A Thousand Words

Elevating students' awareness to George's "aggressively visual culture," that is composed and targeted with forethought, purpose and intent, is as critical a role for composition teachers as introducing them to the construction of persuasive arguments.  In our culture, where arguments rarely stand in stark relief against an objective backdrop, spotting the visual argument may be even more critical.  Consider these examples involving our government:

President Bush and use of numerous American flags.

Stimulus road signs, the recovery act logo and President Obama's campaign logo.

 

In advertising, images are used to created cognitive dissonance.  An unspoken disquieting of the mind and spirit breaks up the fallow ground of the subconscious so the advertiser can sow the seeds for comforting, satisfying, packaged, consumable and profitable (for someone?) solution:

Journalists use the power of images to help tell their stories.  A photo of a family sitting on the roof of a flooded New Orleans says more than the proverbial thousand words and draws the reader into the devastation on a human level.  Questions arise when these same "objective" story tellers modify these potent images to make statements they might not dare say in words:

Newsweek used OJ's actual mugshot; Time retouched photo to make darker.

In her essay, George works to deliver a precise definition of a visual argument.  She knows they exist.  She knows they work in rhetorical ways.  She knows they have some verbal equivalence, but it is elusive.  I think that is the point.  Images do what words cannot. They represent a different language requiring a different literacy.  Pulling back the veil on all sorts of rhetorical devises used in our world can be done in classrooms teaching critical thinking, communication, or psychology, and in a composition classroom as well.  We teach argument and persuasion heuristically.  Students purposefully composing with visual elements will never look at magazines, commercials, movies and art the same way.  We empower students, not necessarily to be proficient in the creation and use of images, but in the understanding of how and why the invisible composer chose that image.  Finding an argument is not always easy, even with the full text right in front of you.  Consider the various cultural and personally interpreted references at play in any newspaper commentary.  Now add the extra layer or layers of ambiguity found in an image.  Grappling with visual arguments is difficult, although in the context of our visual culture, critical.   The digital composition classroom, where arguments are both discovered and constructed, seems like a well-equipped and ideal laboratory.