Hocks.+Understanding+Visual+Rhetoric

=Hocks, Mary E. "Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments."= //CCC// 54.4 2003. 629-656. Print.

=Abstract= This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.

=Argument= Writing in the 21st century is "hybrid---it is at once verbal, spatial, and visual." Hocks seeks to reinforce this concept as she argues for a focus in rhetoric as it applies to writing in a highly technological era. Through an analysis of audience stance, transparency, and hybridity as it is shown through three distinct digital mediums, Hocks shows how teachers and students alike are able to powerfully incorporate participation in an educational environment by use of rhetoric.

=Key Passages= "As writing technologies change, they require changes in our understanding of writing and rhetoric, and, ultimately, in our writing pedagogy," (631).

"I believe that teaching digital rhetoric requires profound changes in how all of us think about both writing and pedagogy," (632).

"The shape of each section thus develops and stresses points of the argument for readers familiar with academic arguments but also familiar with basic Web conventions like scrolling and clicking on buttons," (635).

"The interface leaves these readers with a renewed sense of how design choices become contextualized in arguments, in this case about the changes in page and book designs throughout history," (636).

"...'Monitoring Order' uses colors, visual metaphors, and graphical repetitions to guide us through a meditation about our own perceptions, expectations, and attitudes regarding the visual in relation to text," (638).

"Transparency is also created by defamiliarizing the audience's experiences with reading and writing conventions by drawing explicit and sometimes playful attention to both the discontinuities and the continuities between older and newer forms of reading," (643).

"If we can teach students to critique the rhetorical and visual features of professional hypertexts...we can also teach them to design their own technological artifacts that use these strategies but are more speculative or activist in nature," (645).

=Selected Works Cited= Boese, Christine. 1998. "The Ballad of the Internet Nutball: Chaining Rhetorical Visions from the Margins to the Mainstream in the Xenaverse." Diss. online. .

Bolter, Jay David. 1991. //Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.// Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kress, Gunther. 1999. "'English' at the Crossroads: Rethinking Curricula of Communication on the Context of the Turn to the Visual." //Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century// //Technologies.// Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah UP 66-88.

Porter, James. 1998. //Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing.// Greenwich, CT: Ablex.

Wysocki, Anne Francis. 1998. "Monitoring Order." //Kairos.// Online .