Visual/Verbal Rhetoric - Bonsiepe

Rhetoric - the art of persuasion.

• Originally, rhetoric was used by the greeks for mostly political, legal, or religious reasons
• It was used to obtain a definite decision, implant an opinion, evoke a mood
• it was a "war of words," and was broken into either being persuasive or description/analysis.

In this reading, the author Bonsiepe goes in depth into the breakdown of different rhetorical devices, covering things that were not mentioned in class including transportive figures, privative figures (omission of words)

"Pure information exists for the designer only in the arid abstraction. As soon as he begins to give it concrete shape, the process of rhetorical infiltration begins."

Visual/verbal comparison - a comparison that starts with verbal sign and is continued with visual signs

visual/verbal analogy - a relatum expressed verbally is paralleled by a similar relatum expressed visually.

Visual/verbal metonymy - a relatum indicated by verbal signs is visualized by signs in a real relationship to the verbal relatum; e.g. cause instead of effect, tool instead of activity, producer instead of product.

Visual/verbal chain - a topic begun in words and continued and completed visually.

Visual/verbal negation - verbal signs negate what is shown visually.

Visual synocdoche - a relatum expressed verbally is visualized by a part representing the whole, or vice-versa.

Verbal specification - verbal specification - a visual sign accompanied by only as much text as is necessary for its comprehension.

Visual substitution - one visual sign replaced by another because of its formal characteristics

Syntactic climax and anticlimax - a purely visual figure