George, D. (2002). Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing. College Composition and Communication, 4(1), 11-39. Retrieved from JSTOR.
In this piece, George refers to the current culture as “aggressively visual” which is a term I adore. I want to use this as part of my basis when asserting that syllabi should have a visual design steeped in good rhetoric. Students may not be able to access the document in the multi-faceted layers that a practiced rhetorician can, but having been raised on images, they will come “pre-programmed” with the cultural brainwashing of good and bad visual design. The things that are well designed stuck, and so a good syllabus should join those ranks no matter its purpose or country of origin.
This idea of visual rhetoric being prevalent in culture also applies to online syllabi and calendars, which I would like to analyze on the ODU end of my project. Without the necessary visual literacy, how is a student to know a hyperlink on sight, or what the difference is between a menu bar and a context menu? This will be document specific, but those “moving parts” in e-syllabi are part of the visual culture that upcoming students are raised in.
On page 26, she makes the argument that web pages must be “navigable” and that this ties into graphic design heavily. Although an online syllabus need not necessarily be a web page, I would argue that it, too, must be navigable. Syllabi usually have several pages, and a student who struggles to find information in an ill-formatted document sans bolding, highlighting, or proper paragraphs and spacing, will not use the document for its intended purpose. While a little different than a web page’s navigation bar, I think the coherent thread of thought for “getting around” on them is similar.
Likewise, George’s ideas about what does and does not constitute a visual argument are lax without being nonspefic. She says “All sorts of visuals make assertions and develop those assertions with visual information” which is absolutely true of syllabi. Even in the JP syllabus, there is a visual argument made by the table the information is presented in (albeit a less hearty argument than some of the ODU syllabi I have):
The Japanese syllabus mostly replies on color usage and layout- two tools out of a full box to choose from. I look forward to seeing if the use of less stylizing comes with shifts in purpose, or if this is a cultural difference (since Japan has ways of emphasizing characters that the US does not). This in itself is a visual argument that only highlights the section headers. Down below this screen grab is a numbered list of sections that will be covered, which is also a part of the visual argument. Even then, since the list is not indenter, nor any part of it set apart from the others, it reads as a block of undistinguished text and implies no one section is any more important than the others.
All in all, although this text focuses on the composition classroom, and the history of visual argument’s growing importance in teaching, there are small pearls of wisdom RE: the importance of the visual argument, and of coherency that are extremely important.
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