Visual Rhetoric

        Society today is becoming more visually inclined. I was standing in Barnes & Noble yesterday and looking at some of the books on one of their specialty tables. The table next to it had a number of copies of 50 shades of gray with different covers. A pair of women a few years older than myself walked up to the table to look at the book. One of the girls picked up a copy and began to examine it. The other remarked that she hadn't seen the movie and upon seeing how long the book is remarked, "Oh, I could never get through that, I'll just see the movie instead." At 514 pages it is considered a long novel by most accounts, but it is still shorter than four of the seven Harry Potter novels.

       Yet, people will almost universally see the movie before they read the book. It takes 2-3 hours to watch the movie and significantly more, depending on how fast you read, to finish an entire book. Many people would rather free up their time for other activities. In this way, I think we should be studying visual rhetoric more. We should attempt to find ways to integrate video and pictures into a classroom setting more successfully. Students are told that PowerPoint presentations should be used as a supplement to your presentation and that you should not read off of your presentation. The problem with this is that we do not teach them how to go about doing this successfully.

      It's a weird place to look but the sports community actually has a good idea for what to do here. Most football programs have gone to what is known as the "no-huddle" offense. In this scenario, the offense and defense never get together and say the play call, instead the teams look to their sidelines to get the play relayed to them from the coaches directly. The school in question I am thinking of is Oregon a few years ago:



Here is just one example. The sign here tells different members of the offense what to do for the given play. The players see the images and are able to make the connections. Secrecy in play calling means that the viewer and the opposing defense has no idea what these mean though.

     What I am trying to get at is that these same visual cues can be used in a PowerPoint. Students can choose pictures that remind us of what they are talking about and these can then be used to remind them of where they are going and what they are supposed to be talking about. The visual cues should be things that need to be discussed or short one to two word phrases. I feel that your audience should not be able to read your paper or even your main points. In order to learn about the topic at hand, the students should be engaged in listening to what you have to say about the topics.

       Hopefully, with practice, students can learn how to effectively communicate their argument orally with using the PowerPoint as a means to help supplement their argument.