Transcript Parallels Between Visual and Textual Rhetorical Strategies

Parallels Between Visual and
Textual Rhetorical Strategies
9/11
Unity/Variety
• When a designer wants to
make a subject stand out,
she can surround that
subject by objects of a
different color, size,
placement, and/or shape.
• To create unity, the designer
must instead use objects,
colors, placement, and/ or
shapes that are similar to
each other.
• Let’s think back to the 9/11
Memorial…
Matching Rhetorical Term
• This relates to syntactical
strategies, such as sentence
length and variation, and
anaphora, or epistrophe.*
• This can be done through
repeating a particular word or
phrase, or through mirroring the
structure of a sentence or series
of sentences.
• *Repetition of a word or
expression at the end of
successive phrases, clauses,
sentences, or verses especially for
rhetorical or poetic effect (as in
Lincoln's “of the people, by the
people, for the people”).
Balance
•
To balance compositions, designers
can choose to arrange the
components of an image
symmetrically or asymmetrically,
depending on the message they are
trying to convey.
• Symmetry tends to convey …
order or emphasize the center of the
image
• whereas symmetry can convey …
chaos or simply movement.
•
Similarly, images with a strong
horizontal tend to make us feel calm,
whereas images that use zigzags and
diagonals tend to give us a sense of
motion.
Matching Rhetorical Term
• Symmetry and balanced parallel sentence
structure and its repeating patterns of
language.
•
Language can also achieve balance
through antimetabole in which identical
words are repeated and inverted
•
Writing can also be asymmetrical and
chaotic, with short, clipped sentences or a
series of mismatched clauses strung
together to create energy and disorder.
•
"I had a teacher I liked who used to say
good fiction's job was to comfort the
disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
-- David Foster Wallace
•
"The absence of evidence is not the
evidence of absence." -- Carl Sagan
Contrast
To emphasize an element
or a section of an
element, or to convey the
illusion of volume,
designers use contrast.
Contrast can take the
form of changes in lights
and darks, color, shape,
or placement.
Matching Rhetorical Term
• Writers, too, use contrast —
through the use of imagery,
diction, allusions, tone, or
combinations of rhetorical
strategies.
Antithesis and oxymoron also
employ contrast.
• Consider satire…how does
satire create contrast?
• Humor is used to deride and
make a serious social
argument.
• A serious tone is used in
combination with irony,
exaggeration, and humor to
make a point.
•
Matching Rhetorical Term
• Repeating words or clauses can
create rhythm in text too, through
anaphora or epistrophe. And writers
The playful placement and/or
use syntax — the ordering of
repetition of a shape or object can
words — to create rhythm (think
iambic pentameter). Polysyndeton
can create emphasis
and asyndeton can be used to create
and a sense of movement
a sense of urgency, spontaneity, or a
piling effect — all of which creates a
within a design.
physical experience for the reader. In
The Things They Carried you will
encounter a (seemingly) neverending list of physical and
psychological burdens borne by
soldiers.
• This creates a visceral effect - readers
carry this weight too — and plod
through the descriptions just as the
soldiers plod through Vietnam —
because of the use of polysyndeton
and asyndeton.
Rhythm and Repetition