Abstract

The World Wide Web is a hybrid form of literacy that incorporates visual images in close juxtaposition with verbal text. Composition in electronic writing spaces like the Web is no longer concerned exclusively with the production of words. Visual composition and the confluence of visual rhetorical concerns with verbal rhetorical concerns assume a great deal of importance. Composition teachers have not had to be concerned with visual rhetoric much in the past. But the growth in the reliance upon imagetextual structures to communicate, to inform, or to persuade would seem to indicate that students, especially first-year composition students, could profit greatly from learning how to analyze, understand, and manipulate images as well as words. For this reason, teachers could profit as well from an understanding and the pedagogical application of a few basic principles of design including Gestalt “laws” of visual organization, Wassily Kandinsky's Bauhaus theories of geometric shape and spatial relationships in pictures, the metaphorical codes of color, and visual layout and design principles derived from technical communication and document design theory. An understanding of how certain classical rhetorical principles can also be applied to the confluence of image and text is also valuable in the study and practice of learning to decode symbolic expression and to compose in the fullest sense of the term, both visually and verbally.

Citation

Ramey, J.W. The confluence of visual and verbal rhetoric: Toward a pedagogical theory of the imagetext. Ph.D. thesis, University of Louisville. Retrieved August 9, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/128105/.

This record was imported from ProQuest on October 23, 2013. [Original Record]

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Keywords

• Design and Decorative Arts
• Rhetoric and Composition Language
• Technology of Education