Visual rhetoric is the study of how document design (including the use of illustrations, charts and graphs, typography and layout) communicate, as opposed to aural or verbal messages. Visual rhetoric examines also the relationship between images and writing.
#21053
The way a website presents itself to users is a key aspect of user experience. Effective websites don't interrupt user flow, which is guaranteed largely by posture (how the website uses available resources, particularly visual), and manner (how the website 'talks' to users).
Baker, Adam. Merges.net (2001). Design>Web Design>Writing>Rhetoric
#24783
Welcome to the Third Dimension: Spatial Elements in Exhibit Design 
Modern exhibit design and conventional technical communication are both concerned with verbal and visual presentation of information. Another aspect, not relevant to written technical communication but fundamental to exhibit design is the use of 3dimensional space. This paper examines two spatial elements in exhibit design: Visitor circulation patterns and the scale of displays. Circulation patterns are the paths taken by visitors through the exhibit area. Scale refers to the size of exhibits and architectural features in relation to the size of the average visitor. By comparing two visitor center exhibits that take very different approaches, I will argue that these spacial elements carry meaning and, like any other message, they can influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of spectators.
Jackson, Patricia. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Presentations>Visual Rhetoric
#14038
What Counts as Writing? An Argument From Engineers' Practice 
My argument attempts to add to the kinds of documents seen as worth studying in the discipline loosely known as English. Over the last twenty years, we have moved from thinking that only literature is worth studying to including student writing, business writing, technical writing, and so on as part of our field of study. I think we have to extend our attention to documents which are even less literature-like. Calling these documents 'writing' has consequences for our understanding of both writing and the various fields in which it occurs. As Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford point out, 'We name in order to know, but that naming inevitably limits our knowing. . . . Definitions of writing, of course, reflect a set of ideological assumptions that we ignore only at our peril' (15). The ideological assumptions we ignore here have to do with how knowledge is created and how much control individuals have over their own knowing. Ideology leads both us and engineers to deny that writing has occurred in much engineering practice.
Winsor, Dorothy A. JAC (1992). Articles>Rhetoric>Engineering
#25014
What Good Writers and Editors Know About Design
Words seldom exist in a visual vacuum. With the exception of audio tapes and speeches, words are designed to be read-on book and magazine pages, on computer screens, even on product boxes. And how well those words are designed can greatly influence how often and closely they are read. To communicate effectively, good writers and editors must combine their words with good designs.
Gustafson, Jolene. STC Proceedings (1994). Articles>Writing>Visual Rhetoric
#30730
A study of how three historical rhetorical concepts (kairos, memoria, and mestiza consciousness) are relevant to professional communication practices today, and productive historical concepts for contemporary practitioners.
Haas, Angela. Michigan State University (2004). Articles>Rhetoric>History>Technical Writing
#27739
Over the last two decades, a ‘culture of clarity’ has been gaining ground in many large organisations around the English-speaking world. In the United Kingdom, government departments, banks, insurance companies, local councils and others have come to realise that clear communication is actually a good idea. Instead of writing to impress or confuse, they are now writing to inform and explain. They are using plain English to do this.
#25284
Most of us are used to hearing the word 'rhetoric' used with an exclusively pejorative meaning. This article provides a brief overview of the nature and scope of rhetoric as a legitimate and practical field of academic study.
MacLennan, Jennifer. University of Saskatchewan (2002). Articles>Rhetoric
#18169
What Technical Writers Can Learn from Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language
In a series of books, Christopher Alexander, an urban planner and architect, has inspired object-oriented programmers with his idea of a pattern language-originally, a catalog of solutions to common problems faced by any community or individual creating a livable structure such as a town or a house. His approach might also help technical communicators polish and perfect our own standard rhetorical structures (such as the procedure, user guide, or reference), viewed as common ways of answering frequent, if virtual, questions from our users . Alexander's way of describing age-old patterns such as neighborhoods, streets, paths, and homes may give us a model for creating our own set of patterns in technical communication, whether or not we adopt some of the eager elaborations offered by folks in the object-oriented design world. What's a pattern? For Alexander, a pattern is a practical guide to resolving any problem that occurs over and over, such as how to lay out common ground for a town square, or punch a hole in a wall for a door.
Price, Jonathan R. Communication Circle, The (2001). Articles>Information Design>Rhetoric
#18837
What We Can Learn About Document Design From A Study of the Visual Convergence of the News Media
Information presentation trends that traverse media boundaries point to a visual convergence among print, television, and the web. Examination of how this process takes place through “remediation” in the news media provides insight into the broader media and cultural context in which technical documentation resides. Creating new knowledge for technical communicators who are beyond an elementary understanding of document design requires interdisciplinary research that investigates how usability is redefined in an age of visual convergence.
Cooke, Lynne. STC Proceedings (2002). Articles>Document Design>Visual Rhetoric
#29240
What's Civic About Technical Communication? Technical Communication and the Rhetoric of 'Community' 
Although the concept of community has been advanced in technical communication as a moral reference point for civic rhetorical action, this concept is typically used in romantic, redemptive, and essentializing ways. This article argues for a radical and symbolic/rhetorical view of community, regarding it a discursive construct purposefully invoked by technical writers for strategic reasons.
Ornatowski, Cezar M. and Linn K. Bekins. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>TC>Community Building>Rhetoric
#21584
Where the Visual Meets the Verbal: Collaboration as Conversation
If words follow pictures, as when a poet creates a poem in response to a work of art, then words become a way of seeing. Collaborations between verbal and visual artists produce such insights, regardless of whether the poet responds to the painter or the painter to the poet, since each is speaking in turn in the artistic dialogue which collaboration produces. Yet "Artistic practice and art history have not always looked favorably upon collaborations.
Miltner, Robert. Enculturation (2001). Articles>Collaboration>Visual Rhetoric
#14241
Who should be listed as the authors of an article for a journal or conference proceedings? The basic requirement for authorship is that an author should be able to take public responsibility for the content of the paper. People who may have contributed intellectually to the work but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged in the appropriate section of the paper.
Burgan, Murrie W. STC Proceedings (1994). Presentations>Rhetoric>Writing
#25487
Whose Ideas?: The Technical Writer's Expertise In Inventio
Compelling arguments from researchers studying the rhetoric of science have convinced both scientists and humanists that technical writing involves invention, or discovery of the available means of argument. If we agree that inventio is crucial to technical writing, however, we encounter a problem: namely, that the rhetor engaged in invention as part of a technical writing process does not necessarily have expertise in the subject matter of the composition. What, then, is the expertise that the technical writer contributes to the invention process? Working from the notion that knowledge is an activity rather than a commodity, I argue that a technical writer's expertise in invention lies in an ability to adapt rhetorical heuristics to situations of interdisciplinary collaboration. This focus expands our understanding of how invention works when the goal of communication is producing knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, rather than winning an argument with persuasive techniques.
Harkness Regli, Susan. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1999). Articles>Writing>Technical Writing>Rhetoric
#27775
Why a Good Title Makes a White Paper
The title is your white paper's absolute first impression. In it rests success or failure for the words that lie beyond, waiting for a reader. If the title does not encourage someone to read further, the ink that coats your white paper will never be seen.
Stelzner, Michael A. WhitePaperSource (2006). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric>White Papers
#19103
Why and How Our Institutional Home Matters: Strategic Program Planning in a Specific Setting
My presentation will address the conference question of how institutional setting affects program focus and development. The answer, at least as we understand it so far, turns out to be fairly complex. In our case, for example, the recent changes to our Technical Writing degree have been directly responsive to rapid changes in the field of technical communication, in evolving technologies, and in the importance of information systems and web-related writing and design for technical communicators, At the same time, it is clearly the case that an equally strong influence has been the internal pressures we feel as we find ourselves competing with other departments at CMU for students who had once been a kind of private preserve, And this pressure involves more than competition for students. An equally important value at stake is our perceived status and role within our department and our university.
Schnakenberg, Karen R. CPTSC Proceedings (2000). Academic>Education>Rhetoric
#31235
As business communicators, our goal is typically to influence opinion or change behavior in order to achieve business objectives. To accomplish this, we must get people to interact with our message. A page of 12-point Times New Roman text is seldom compelling, so what you are left with to persuade people to read your publication is graphic design.
Canfield, Jocelyn. Communication World Bulletin (2007). Design>Document Design>Typography>Visual Rhetoric
#27825
Why Do Business Cases Fail? What Can You Do About It?
A business case may predict excellent results yet still fail to 'make the case.' We see project managers, IT directors, sales people, and others who have just had the painful experience: they predicted great cash flow, high ROI, and short payback - and still got a thumbs down from top management.
Solution Matrix (2006). Articles>Business Communication>Rhetoric>Business Case
#20694
Why Illustrations Aid Understanding
A small collection of illustrations is provided to show some of the diverse ways illustration may aid understanding. The display of parts and assemblies often relies on techniques such as explosions and canonical views to communicate the global structure and relations of a system that may have hidden pieces. Book illustrations exemplify specific visions of described situations and allow readers to save memory and summarily review potentially complex descriptions. Visual proofs abstract from details and embody reliable metatheories that provide semantic guarantees for inferences. And conceptual illustrations when effective rely the logical method of universal generalization to help viewers grasp general ideas.
Kirsh, David. IWM-KMRC. Design>Graphic Design>Technical Illustration>Visual Rhetoric
#30809
Why Write Instructions That No One is Going to Read?
I know that a lot of people never read instruction manuals or online help. But you know what? Some people do.
HelpScribe (2008). Articles>Documentation>Rhetoric>Technical Writing
#25107
Wi-Fi Rhetoric: Driving Mobile Technologies
I argue that the wi-fi industry promises mobility, security, and entertainment not by emphasizing the open-spectrum technologies upon which they are based but through strategies that anticipate and recycle generic consumer values. These values—obtained by quantifying and interpretting consumer behaviors or "choices"—are represented by a universal product image that obfuscates difference, contradiction, and conflict in order to distribute products efficiently to a mass audience.
Moeller, Ryan. Kairos (2004). Articles>Rhetoric>Wireless Web
#31605
Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates
Elements of persuasion are important to creating winning content. To help safeguard content from becoming manipulation, we need to understand its distinction from persuasion. As a step toward that understanding, this article: provides basic definitions of persuasion and manipulation; explores the key differences between them; and describes some consequences for UX content.
Jones, Colleen. UXmatters (2008). Articles>Web Design>Writing>Rhetoric
#25066
The Wonder of Writing Across the Curriculum
The main reason I got involved with writing across the curriculum fifteen years ago was administrative and related to campus politics. The main reason I have stayed actively involved in writing across the curriculum for fifteen years is personal and related to my teaching. Quite simply, I am a better teacher because of writing across the curriculum. So while motivations and intentions are messy things to characterize, for me the combination of administrative and teaching responsibilities and personal and public desires have led to most of my professorial life being engaged in writing across the curriculum — in my own classroom and on my college campuses — first at Michigan Tech, and now for six years at Clemson University.
Young, Art. LLAD (1994). Articles>Rhetoric>Writing Across the Curriculum
#30620
Words into Pictures: Applying Visual Thinking to Online Documentation
How can writers enhance their visual literacy in order to create effective online documentation? By partnering multimedia production expertise with technical writing expertise, DVS Communications and Bell-Northern Research (BNR) have co-developed an introductory course 'Words into Pictures' that stimulates visual thinking capabilities. This paper describes the main components of the course and illustrates its contribution to the success of BNR's online information system CADHELP.
Couse, Mary M., Malcolm W.J.F. Graham and Louis W. Stokes. STC Proceedings (1993). Articles>Documentation>Online>Visual Rhetoric
#23163
If the average business letter starts poorly, then it invariably finishes poorly. Your closing paragraph should bring your letter to a polite, businesslike close. Typical final paragraphs in business letters invite the reader to write again or use overused and meaningless phrases that detract from the impact of the letter.
Newman, Judith M. LupinWorks. Articles>Business Communication>Correspondence>Rhetoric
#27368
All writers have a license to end, and there are many ways to do so.
Clark, Roy Peter. Poynter Online (2004). Articles>Writing>Rhetoric
