Visual Rhetoric

Ever find yourself aimlessly scrolling through your Facebook feed looking for anything interesting, when suddenly a striking image of a hot model or an adorably cute puppy advertisement catches your eye?  Were you driven to click on it?  Did it influence you to take action or change the way you felt about something?  If you answered yes, then you were effectively influenced by visual rhetoric.

 I am currently researching visual rhetoric and how it helps businesses with their marketing and advertising. When rhetoric was defined in 4^th century B.C. it was viewed simply as an act of persuasion (Trenholm).  As time has gone on, its definition has evolved from an act of persuasion to a perspective or lens through which we evaluate things (Trenholm).  This evolution of the definition has also prompted new concepts to form.  One of these concepts is visual rhetoric.  Visual rhetoric is a form of communication that uses images to create a meaning or construct an argument. 

My main focus is to analyze the “A Tip From A Former Smoker” ads that many of us have seen on television commercials and the occasional ad on our Facebook feed.  These ads have a strong message that really resonates with its audience and I want to know why and how they are so effective.  One reason they are so successful is because both the images and the written text in each ad work together to convey a similar message.  This is an example of resonance, which is “grounded on a strict interaction between the visual and verbal component of an ad (Grancea).”

         I am confident in all of the sources I have so far.  My primary source is a government run website, my secondary scholarly article has strong research and data, and my third, a communication studies book, is used in teaching the subject of communication at the college level. 

For my next round of research on this subject, I would like to find data on what kind of results this advertising campaign has had.  How many people have quit as a result of seeing it?  This should give me an idea of how successful or unsuccessful the visual rhetoric used in the ads really are.

Trenholm, Sarah. Thinking through Communication: An Introduction to the Study of Human Communication. 6th ed. Pearson, 2010. Print.

GRANCEA, Ioana. "Visual Rhetoric And Framing Strategies In Advertising Word-Based Product Categories." Argumentum: Journal The Seminar Of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory & Rhetoric 12.1 (2014): 146-162. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.

"Tips From A Former Smoker." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 24 Apr. 2015. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.

"The Case for Visual Rhetoric." The Case for Visual Rhetoric. 27 Mar. 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2015.