We are exposed to visual rhetoric multiple times a day. The most common source of rhetoric is an advertisement. However, there are other examples of rhetoric in our every day lives such as graffiti. It is an informal form of communication, but it is still a way for people to try to alter the audience's feelings. In class we had to analyze visual rhetoric. Once we did so in a powerpoint presentation and then later on in the year we chose an image and analyzed it. We then compared the two analysis and found that our skills had developed greatly since the beginning of the class.
VISUAL RHETORIC
Visual rhetoric
People use numerous different things to try and change the views of someone else. One thing that people oftentimes use rhetoric for is religion. In the picture below, you can see that there was a car with more than one religious advertisement on it. There were bumper stickers that had sayings on them about christianity and heaven. Also, the bumper sticker even says something about heaven on it. While the slide only includes a brief caption about the photo, my analysis of the picture was not very deep. I looked as rhetoric in a much more general sense. I took things literal and didn't know what to look for when analyzing rhetoric. Now I know that the concepts get much more complex. There are more meanings behind things then I once thought. Although this picture holds a piece of rhetoric that is pretty straight forward, I have learned that sometimes in order to decipher a piece of rhetoric, one must go beyond the surface and ask questions about the scenario to figure out exactly what the writer was trying to target and accomplish.
Later in the semester, we were asked to choose an image and analyze its rhetorical content. I chose an image of a gun. Where the bullets should be, there are cigarettes instead. I decided to choose a piece of rhetoric that had more to it then just the image itself. My analysis focused a lot more on ways that the image would catch the attention of someone and meet certain appeals through its content. I didn't just look at the image and give a literal meaning for it, but instead I took what I knew about rhetoric and thought about the different things that the publisher may have considered when creating the image. I can tell that my knowledge on rhetoric and deciphering it has definitely expanded, and even though I am not the publisher of these images, I can use what information I know to put myself in the publisher's shoes and figure out why they did what they did when creating the image. Below is my most recent rhetorical analysis on the picture of the gun that I previously described.
