This article is about the understanding of the rhetoric in a digital space. The author Hocks, begins by explaining how much the teaching of writing has changed over the years. Hocks describes it by saying that now a day’s teachers and students are using technology more than ever to write. And since the world of technology is changing so rapidly students need to be taught how to adapt to the new writing technology that is created. Then she talks about verbal and visual texts. Visual text is just as needed as verbal text and they are not that much different from each other anymore. But I will be explaining the three main concepts that visual digital rhetoric consist of.
She picks out three words that help writers describe visual rhetoric operations: audience stance, transparency and hybridity. She explains that audience stance is the way the audience is invited to participate in online documents. Which means how some writers work gives readers the sense of interactive involvement and she describe the change of the kinds of involvements too. Writing started off from mouth to mouth stories, then to pen and paper essays and now to writing a paper using some kind of technology which makes it easier to become more active in the writing as well as the digital world. The second term is Transparency which means how a writer uses familiar designs to design their document to give clarity to their readers. She supports her evidence by giving the example of Wysocki Webs Page. He used Monitoring Order- which uses forms and colors that a typical user of online documents would understand. And the last term is called hybridity which refers to the relationship and structure between visual and verbal space online. She use Wysocki’s site to give evidence of her definition. He use content such as quotes, pictures and his argument all throughout his web page. He made the visual and verbal content need each other-if you only had one of them it wouldn’t have made such a clear argument.
In conclusion the author then said that the audience stance is music, sounds, images and hypertext that focuses the reader to be actively involved but also engaged. The transparency is making the content familiar but also new that the audience is comfortable and can understand the content but so learning new things while reading documents. And that hybridity is just putting visual and verbal content together to create a writing.