Revisualizing Simple Data: Teaching Alternative Data Visualizations to Students through Bernie Sanders’ Social Media Graphic on the Digital Divide

Political Images, Visual Rhetoric, , ,

Brumberger’s critical piece on teaching business student’s data visualizations presents complications about software usage in cases of charts and graphs. While complex data visualization creation may be necessary, another approach may help ease students into the understanding of visual rhetoric surrounding data. This approach, involving simple data statistics, creates a representation of the data through…

Read More

Hassett’s Rhetorical Design Functions & the Zillow Website

Visual Rhetoric, , ,

According to Hassett, business document design needs special attention to four “basic rhetorical functions”: alignment, invitation, credibility, and persuasion. Since business document design has come to include digital writing and design, I thought it would be especially useful to analyze a website with these points in mind. I’ve chosen the popular realty website Zillow, which…

Read More

We the People Defend Dignity: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the Iconic Women’s March Poster

Political Images, Visual Rhetoric, , , ,

“The rhetorical transformation of a new media image unfolds at differing speeds and in different spatial configurations, depending on what material forms it takes on, whether these manifest in physical or cyberspace, and any number of institutional, economic, political, or personal forces that shape their design, production, distribution, and maintenance.” Laurie Gries, On Rhetorical Becoming…

Read More

Photo of Chip and Joanna Gaines sitting on their porch with a dog.

Passive Consumption of Images: Examining Instagram “Reality” in the First-year College Writing Classroom

Visual Rhetoric, , ,

“No visual perception is a pure apprehension of objective reality.” Charles HIll, “Reading the Visual in College Writing Classes” Hill recognizes the “epistemic power” of images and argues that college writing courses should make an effort to expose students to the complexity of visual communication in order to study and analyze it—largely because United States…

Read More

Lester’s “Visual Cues” in Lowe’s Video Advertising

Visual Rhetoric, , , ,

Using Lester’s Visual Cues, specifically the information on colors, I wanted to examine a video advertisement by Lowe’s and examine it for the basic principles he discusses of the objective, comparative, and subjective methods, and sociological uses of color. Regarding colors within the video, there are two different color palettes that play out between the…

Read More