New publication by Annenberg’s Paul Messaris

Paul Messaris, Ph.D., the Lev Kuleshov Professor of Communication, has published an article  "What's Visual about Visual Rhetoric?" in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, (2009, Vol. 95, No. 2, pp. 210-223.)

In this essay, Professor Messaris discusses the burgeoning field of visual rhetoric -- the study of visual media as means of persuasion. He argues that recent publications in this field have not paid sufficient attention to the unique and distinctive properties of visual communication. "If the main goal is simply to show that rhetorical analysis can be applied to images just as productively as it is applied to words, then [these writings] have all succeeded spectacularly. However, if the study of visual rhetoric is also supposed to result in broader theoretical conclusions about the power of images—if it is supposed to tell us what makes images special, in comparison with words and other means of communication—then the record of achievement here is more equivocal.... Perhaps because they are reacting to a perceived verbal bias in communication departments’ approaches to rhetoric, many of the authors [of these studies] seem more concerned with the rhetorical intricacies and complexities and subtleties of specific images than with the generic properties of images as means of persuasive communication. As a result, a reader might come away from some of this material with an insufficient appreciation of how different visual persuasion can be from its verbal counterpart."