November 05, 2010

WEEK 6: Visual Rhetoric

Rhetoric means the act of persuasion. Its not only limited to verbal communication whereby the speaker will try to persuade the audience to think or act in certain way as the speaker wished to. Other than speech or words, visual images/pictures are used as a tool to persuade viewers. Both words and visual are combine together to create a more persuasive tool by the advertising companies and business organization to make income. How does visual images can be used to communicate with the public by persuading them to think or accept the message the way we want them to interpret?

As mentioned by Aristotle, The method of persuasion is a "demonstration," and demonstration's instrument is enthymeme which is a form of argument. (Rhetoric)

Rhetoric must have an argument to answer by the audience. By using this methodology, the producer may convince the audience accept a specific interpretation of message. Without an argument - there is no persuasion exist in the communication. The process of this argument is by creating an unstated premise or question to the audience which later involve the audience to solve the unexpressed premises.

Adidas is a well-known football shoes brand.
All of the famous football stars are wearing Adidas in the pictures.
We want to be famous and good as them? - 'Adidas football shoes is the perfect choice to play football'


In this pictures, a men died in front of the women. Without the instruments in the picture, we will not know the cause to his death. By anchoring the whole picture with the instrument, we knew that he died because of drugs.
Drugs is harmful - unstated premise 1.
He died after taking over dose amount of drugs - unstated premise 2.
We can conclude that drugs can bring us to death condition. This is how visual image persuade people to accept the message they trying to sent.

This picture does trying to say that the weight of the polar bear was balanced enough to pose on a cracking ice. An issue which is general or fact to the public nowadays is global warming. The atmosphere is becoming thinner as a result of direct sunlight. This image trying to say that this species are in danger where the ice-bergs melts drastically every year. Human condition are also affected in this situation. Although the pictures does not conclude this conclusion but from the image we can get the idea that our human including animal species are in danger if we keep on ignoring the global warming situation.

In this video showed a competition between two giants car industry which is BMW and AUDI. In this advertisement designed by BMW, it mentioned all the statement about good car condition, great car regeneration and other criteria that BMW have. The end part when the boy looks outside the windows and said that its not a vision anymore to have this excellent figure of (BMW) which all parked outside. The first unstated premise found - why is one Audi park within all BMW?
When the boy look outside the window and spot Audi parked between his favorite cars (BMW) - where the second premise comes in 'Almost every cars has it!" said the boy.
We can conclude that BMW is much better then Audi from the criteria described by the boy in his class whereby he did not see Audi remain in the same level like BMW anymore.

(incase the video did not work* click this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6KYaF95w3g)

      REFFERENCES: 
  • Kress.G, Leeuven T.V, (1996), Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, London ; Routledge
  • Charles.A, Marguerite.H, (2004), Defining visual rhetoric, Routledge
  • Linda M., (1994), Images in Advertising: The Need for a Theory of Visual Rhetoric (Journal)

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