Parallels Between Visual and Textual Rhetorical Strategies

9/11

Unity/Variety When a designer wants to make a subject stand out, she can surround that subject by objects of a different color, size, placement, and/or shape. To create unity, the designer must instead use objects, colors, placement, and/ or shapes that are similar to each other. Let’s think back to the 9/11 Memorial…where did we see unity? Variety? Matching Rhetorical Term This relates to syntactical strategies, such as sentence length and variation, and anaphora, or epistrophe.* This can be done through repeating a particular word or phrase, or through mirroring the structure of a sentence or series of sentences. *Repetition of a word or expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect (as in Lincoln's “of the people, by the people, for the people.”)

Balance Matching Rhetorical Term Symmetry and balanced parallel sentence structure and its repeating patterns of language. Language can also achieve balance through antimetabole and chiasmus in which identical words are repeated and inverted Writing can also be asymmetrical and chaotic, with short, clipped sentences or a series of mismatched clauses strung together to create energy and disorder. "I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." -- David Foster Wallace "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." -- Carl Sagan To balance compositions, designers can choose to arrange the components of an image symmetrically or asymmetrically, depending on the message they are trying to convey. Symmetry tends to convey … order or emphasize the center of the image whereas asymmetry can convey … chaos or simply movement. Similarly, images with a strong horizontal tend to make us feel calm, whereas images that use zigzags and diagonals tend to give us a sense of motion.

Contrast Matching Rhetorical Term Writers, too, use contrast — through the use of imagery, diction, allusions, tone, or combinations of rhetorical strategies. Antithesis and oxymoron also employ contrast. Consider satire…how does satire create contrast? Humor is used to deride and make a serious social argument. A serious tone is used in combination with irony, exaggeration, and humor to make a point. To emphasize an element or a section of an element, or to convey the illusion of volume, designers use contrast. Contrast can take the form of changes in lights and darks, color, shape, or placement.

and a sense of movement within a design. Rhythm and Repetition Matching Rhetorical Term Repeating words or clauses can create rhythm in text too, through anaphora or epistrophe. And writers can use syntax — the ordering of words — to create rhythm (think iambic pentameter). Polysyndeton and asyndeton can be used to create a sense of urgency, spontaneity, or a piling effect — all of which creates a physical experience for the reader. In The Things They Carried you will encounter a (seemingly) never-ending list of physical and psychological burdens borne by soldiers. This creates a visceral effect - readers carry this weight too — and plod through the descriptions just as the soldiers plod through Vietnam — because of the use of polysyndeton and asyndeton. The playful placement and/or repetition of a shape or object can create emphasis and a sense of movement within a design.