Readings about Forms & Delivery

25 Understanding Visual Rhetoric

Jenae Cohn

Visuals can dramatically impact our understanding of a rhetorical situation. In a writing class, students do not always think that they will need to be attentive to visuals, but visual information can be a critical component to understanding and analyzing the rhetorical impacts of a multimodal text. This chapter gives examples of what visual rhetoric looks like in everyday situations, unpacking how seemingly mundane images like a food picture on social media or a menu at a restaurant, can have a persuasive impact on the viewer. The chapter then offers students some terms to use when describing visuals in a variety of situations (Writing Spaces).

Read Jenae Cohn’s “Understanding Visual Rhetoric.”

 

Keywords from this chapter in Writing Spaces

visual, , multimodal, , image

 

Author Bio

Jenae Cohn is the director of academic technology at California State University, Sacramento. She is the author of the forthcoming book Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, which will be published by West Virginia University in June 2021 (Inside Higher Ed).

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