Visual Arguments: Overview
All communication, to some degree, is an argument. The essays we write in college courses usually are trying to prove a point, or, at the very least, to communicate the importance of our ideas. But arguments are not restricted to the words we speak or type. Visual arguments occur all around us all the time: on social media, on billboards, on our TVs, and in so many other places where we encounter visual attempts to grab our attentions and persuade our choices.
The ancient Greeks defined rhetoric as word-based methods of persuasion, using appeals such as ethos, logos, and pathos. Visual rhetoric refers to the use of visuals (rather than just words) to communicate an idea or to support an argument. Visual rhetoric suggests that images and other visual elements also possess the ability to persuade and should be treated just like any other form of communication.
To craft effective visual arguments in a college course requires a communicator to build upon and expand their text-based writing skills. You must carefully choose visuals that will have the most rhetorical effectiveness for your purpose, design those visuals into compositions that are balanced and appealing, and consider the specific mediums and contexts through which the visuals will be communicated to an audience.
Key Features
Creating a Visual Argument: Getting Started
Like writing an effective essay, creating a successful visual argument requires some thinking and planning. But since we all live in a world dominated by visual arguments, we also already have a sense of what works well. Melanie Gagich, in her essay “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing,” writes that students already have knowledge of multimodal and digital types of communication. This means your job is to actualize that prior knowledge into a process to help creative effective visual arguments.
First Five Steps of Creating a Visual Argument
Gagich also lays out five steps for creating a multimodal text that can be adapted to creating visual arguments.
Determine Your Rhetorical Situation
Like any kind of communication, you first need to carefully think through your genre, audience, and purpose when creating a visual argument.
- Genre
- What kind of visual argument are you making, and for what context? A flier posted in a hallway on one college campus is a very different context than a social media post shared with college students across the country. Both visual arguments would need to be executed differently based on their genre expectations and contexts.
- Audience
- Who is the audience, or audiences, of your visual argument, and how should your visual design be tailored to that audience? If you’re trying to reach senior citizens, then a research poster in a local library might work well, but a humorous meme on social media might not reach the audience you’re aiming for.
- Purpose
- What is the goal of your visual argument, and how should your visual design reflect that goal? If you’re trying to share important information about community safety, for example, then using cartoonish clip art probably isn’t the wisest design choice.
Review and Analyze Other Visual Arguments
Take the time to find and study similar visual arguments to what you are trying to create. What works well in the examples you found that you could borrow? What design choices worked poorly and should be avoided?
Gather Content, Media, and Tools
Think about the content you will need for your visual argument, including the types of media you will need and where you might find that media. Also consider which design tools will work best for your rhetorical situation.
Give Credit, Cite Accordingly
If you borrow anything from elsewhere, such as images, video clips, snippets of text, then make sure you are ready to somehow give credit within your visual design. You might not need, or want, to use full-on citations, but signal phrases and hyperlinks might work best depending on the kind of visual argument you’re making.
Begin Drafting Your Visual Argument
Now you’re ready to start drafting (and then revising) your visual argument as necessary!
Effective Visual Choices
Advertisers favor visual media—television, magazines, and billboards—because they are an effective way to hook an audience. Websites rely on color, graphics, icons, and a clear system of visual organization to engage users. Visuals bring ideas to life for audiences in multiple ways:
- As a link between data and usable knowledge
- To provide concrete, vivid, and quick representations
- To save space
- To speak in a universal language
- To be persuasive
Types and Purposes of Visuals
There are many types of visuals you can incorporate in visual arguments to illustrate and emphasize your point and persuade an audience. Here are some examples:
Symbols include a range of items that can be either pictographic or abstract.
Maps sometimes include map charts or statistical maps. A map can represent more than physical geography depending on the purpose of the visual argument.
Graphs, tables, and diagrams can take a variety of forms, with some of the most common being line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, and flow charts.
Photos depict people, places, and things, and are used in visual arguments to tell a story, provide a scenario, and persuade an audience.
Illustrations can be realistic or abstract. The reception of an illustration varies depending on the audience as well as on the purpose of your visual argument.
The types of visuals you choose will and should be determined by the purpose of each element in your visual design. Here are some guidelines for choosing visuals based on purpose:
| Communication Purpose | Consider These Visuals |
| Depict an object | Photo, 3D Model, Illustration |
| Persuade an audience | Photo, Illustration, Chart (showing statistics) |
| Demonstrate a procedure | Photo, Illustration, Flowchart |
| Explain a process | Diagram, Symbol, Illustration |
| Make comparisons | Bar Graph, Line Graph, Table |
| Demonstrate trends or data | Line Graph |
| Organize information | Map, Table |
Balanced Use of Visual Elements: Texts, Colors, Images, and Overall Design
When composing a visual argument, balance is key. This doesn’t mean each visual element should be the same size or take up the same amount of space. In fact, that could hurt the effectiveness of the visual argument since there’s no clear hierarchy of which elements should be most important to the audience. With this in mind, it’s up to you to decide which elements need to be emphasized most and how to achieve the right visual balance in your overall design.
Generally speaking, in a visual composition the elements you will need to incorporate and balance are texts, images, colors, and the overall design choices that bring all these elements together. In an ideal visual argument, all of these elements should be balanced into their most effective form to appeal to the intended audience.
The Purdue OWL has created an overview of the main elements of visual rhetoric:
Additionally, the below video from the Purdue OWL use examples to demonstrate how to achieve balance in a visual argument:
Sources Used to Create this Chapter
Parts of this chapter were remixed from:
- Introduction to College Writing at CNM compiled by Jennifer Schaller and Tammy Wolf, which was published under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.
