Introduction

In the article, Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Enviornments, Mary E. Hocks introduces the roles of visual rhetoric for writers working in digital writing environments. By addressing features such as audience stance, transparency, and hybridity; Hocks persuades the audience on the importance of teachers teaching students on visual rhetoric in this new day and age. Visual rhetoric is defined as a means for persuasion or a visual strategy. Visual rhetoric is important especially now because of the evolving nature of hypertext and multimedia writing.

Hypertext

Hocks discusses how these new interactive forms of media sometimes make it difficult for a person to separate words from visual. They’re almost interchangeable. These arguments on this new found relationship between words and visuals are backed by hypertext theorists such as software designers Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce who are the creators of Storyspace. As society and the media we consume become more progressive we call in to question what we consider writing now. With a high attention devoted to the relationship between verbal and visual meanings in digital media, Hocks calls in to question the way in which we teach writing.

Hybridity

The author suggests articulating principles of visual rhetoric in the classroom for students. Because students are now bringing high hybrid literacy to the classrooms; an increase in visual interactive rhetoric of digital documents is needed.  Writing is hybrid. It can be visual, verbal, and spatial all at once. The relationship between visual texts and verbal texts and also image and word are not binary opposites, but inseparable.

Hocks, Mary. “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments,” College Composition and Communication 54.4 (2003): pp. 629-656.