Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Elements, by Mary E. Hocks, June 2003.
The article talks about rhetoric and composition as digital writing elements. Writers who combine visual strategies with hypertext can create interactive rhetorical pages. “Interactive digital text can blend words and visuals, talk and text, and authors and audiences in ways that are not recognizably postmodern”(Hocks, 2)
Engage an audience through interactive options by using hypertext structural agency. Hypertext offers several ways to read and interact with a document. The idea of having graphic elements appear to the user at the moment of textural thought and get verbal reinforcement simultaneously gives a new look to rhetorical writing. Hypertext capabilities have been around since the early 90’s. The current applications of hypertext are boundless for rhetorical writing. The integration of graphic imaging with textural content is a great teaching tool. The communication impact of an image is what movies are all about. In some sense hypertext can be as dynamic a movie depending on the “Monitor Order” and content of the image.
“The Ballard of the Internet Nutball,” by Christine Boese complements the uses of a hypertextual dissertation. “This research examined how the rhetorical visions of this culture are used to write the narratives of its ongoing existence, in a way that is increasingly independent of the dominant narratives of the television program itself.”
Digital communication is instant, like being face to face, the user can send current information and easily find like minded people. Social media attracts like-minded people who gain confidence and strength in groups and form refined relationships. The refined relationship of the group develops into focused interest. The digital communication between user is open to rhetorical writing and multimodal methods of communication. The focus groups of social media and Blog pages are avenues for postmodern visual rhetorical writing. People can have relationships that are based on photos, sounds, and mental images. “The screen itself is a tablet that combines words, interfaces, icons, and pictures that evoke other modalities like touch and sound.”(Hocks) Visual rhetoric is when visual and verbal elements work together. Hypertext is an element of visual rhetoric contained in a digital file and used to interface with the user.
Multimodality is like the Egyptian hieroglyph, by using symbology as a graphics tool and couple that with sound bites, a message is born. The Egyptian hieroglyphic images used graphic methods to communicate information. Egyptian symbols called Hieroglyphics are from ancient times. The use of symbology to communicate ideas is ancient history. The content of a hieroglyph represents a composite of information and not just one idea or thought. The relationship to rhetorical writing and the application of hypertext are developed from the Egyptian hieroglyphic writings. The Egyptians used mediums that lasted for thousands of years and still communicate the same ideas. The relief writings weathered, remained longer than the scribes who interpret the writings. Even after deliberate attempts to deface, disguise, destroy, and miss-represent these ancient writings, the Egyptian writings have prevailed through the test of time.
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