Thinking Critically About

Document Design, Visual Rhetoric,

and Multimodal Messages
Chapter 5
Rhetorical use of Images
• We can think rhetorically about
• photographs,

• drawings, and other images as well as

• cultural artifacts such as clothing

•for instance, the heart-breaking photograph in summer 2015 of a drowned Syrian

child washed up on a beach—a photograph that shocked audiences worldwide to
care about refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war.
• They condense an argument into a memorable scene or symbol that taps deeply
into our emotions and values.
Images and Appeals to Logos, Ethos, and
Pathos
• They make
1. implicit arguments (logos) while
2. also appealing to our values and emotions (pathos) and
3. causing us to respond favourably or unfavourably to the artist or
photographer (ethos).

• Like verbal texts, images have an angle of vision that controls what viewers
see.
• Through camera location, framing, filtering/lighting, and
• Photoshop techniques such as cropping, brushing, and blurring, the
photographer steers us toward a particular view of the subject
Images: Open to Interpretation

• images can have powerful rhetorical

effects, these effects may be less
controllable and more audience
dependent than those of verbal texts.
Consider, for example, the photo
• the climate change debate - rapid
melting of Arctic and Antarctic ice
• the magnificent, strange beauty of
this part of the world
Rhetorical use of words, images, and sounds
in multimodal texts
• multimodal texts, by which we mean texts that supplement words with another
mode of communication
• such as still images, moving images, or sounds.
• The word multimodal combines the concepts of “multi” (more than one) and
“modality” (a channel, medium, or mode of communication).
• Multimodal texts can be either
• “stills” that combine words with images (a poster, a PowerPoint slide, a print advertisement)
or
• texts in motion that combine video with voice, printed text, music, or other sounds (TV
advertisements, advocacy videos, instructional YouTube videos).
Multimodal “Stills”:
Images and
Take-Away Headlines
• A classic World War II poster alerting soldiers in jungle warfare to the
dangers of unsafe drinking water. The poster shows a soldier, a canteen
cup in his hand and a look of horror on his face, peering into a pond in
search of drinking water.
• The poster’s message is conveyed visually by the reflection of the
soldier’s face transfigured into a skull—a powerful appeal to pathos.
• But the same message is also conveyed textually through the words:
“BEWARE . . . Drink Only Approved Water. Never give a germ a
break!”
• The words, which appeal primarily to logos, serve as a nutshell for the
whole argument, making the poster’s message unmistakably clear.
• The words themselves also register visually through the effect of layout
and font size.
• The top half of the poster, the large-font, all-caps “BEWARE” seems to
shout a warning to the soldier.
• In the bottom half of the poster, the text next to the skull—“Drink only
approved water”—uses a smaller font and calm sentence to convey the
poster’s take-away message.
• Finally, the words along the poster’s bottom border (“Never Give a
Germ a Break!”) in still a different font offer a causal explanation of
why the water might kill you.