viz.

By Tim Turner (Contact)
See also Propaganda and Visual Rhetoric

What is the relationship between rhetoric and violence? Are they mutually exclusive?
Is violence only conceivable as a failure of rhetoric? Can rhetoric itself be violent?
Isn't violence often employed as a means of persuasion?

By Tim Turner (Contact)
See also Visual Rhetoric and Violence

When teaching a rhetoric course, I love to use the Apple Commercials to show my students an example of real-world ethos.

I recently incorporated the Garry Winogrand photo below into an in-class writing exercise. The exercise is essentially the same as one that I came up with when helping Brooks Landon teach his Prose Style course at the University of Iowa a few years ago. Keep reading to learn more about the writing exercise.

I bring a photo in to class, usually one that depicts something weird, something that probably has a story behind it but that doesn't make that story explicit. I project the photo and don't tell the students a word about it, not when it was taken, by whom, nothing. Then the students have to write about the photo. It's a creative assignment and in this case I was trying to get them to think about form. Specifically, after a workshop on the subject in the prior class, I was asking them to write "cumulative" sentences. Cumulative sentences, for those of you who aren't prose style junkies, are described in Francis Christensen's essay "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." So, the photo was just a prompt to get the students writing in a new mode that we had been working on. The exercise went very well and my students generated some whacky, but stylistically adventurous, prose. If I get their permission, I will post some of their writings in the comments soon.

Notes for the Instructor: This assignment is designed to introduce students to OmniGraffle and give them practice in using it. However, instructors may also tweak the assignment to achieve specific goals related to the course; for example, OmniGraffle is an excellent resource for, among other things, brainstorming ideas for paper topics, or thinking about structure and organization in writing (it presents a more flexible, visually-organized model than, for example, a “Roman-numeral” outline). It can also be used to complement reading exercises as a way to “visualize” how arguments or texts are constructed. This assignment asks students to take specific set of topics, or topoi, (selected either by the students or by the instructor), and map them, creating a visual representation of the various connections between ideas. Instructors can plan on using one full class period to work on this project, at the end of which students can submit their maps to the teacher folder saved as .pdf files. As points of reference, you can see one example on this page, and another example is attached.

Notes for the Instructor: This assigment is designed to introduce students to Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software. Students are asked to work in groups and create presentations related to the content of the course (the instructor may wish to generate a list of acceptable topics). This assignment is designed to last no more than 2 or 3 class meetings: students will choose (or be assigned) their groups and topics, work on the presentations outside of class, and then present them to their peers. Students are also asked to submit a two-page paper describing the process of working on the project; instructors may choose to tweak this aspect of the assignment according to the goals of the course.