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We have, then, to introduce our students to a much more cluttered public square than 50 years ago, thanks to 200+ cable channels, rapidly subdividing magazines (do we need five bicycling magazines?), global film distribution via video, DVD, streaming video, satellite radio, bifurcating musical genres, and of course the 6 billion web pages in Google’s database. The Burkean parlor is now a convention hall with many thousands crowded in, and the flow of the conversation is more like a babble. Rhetoric originated as the study of persuasive speech, and then was extended to writing; as writing comes to include visual and interactive forms of communication, further extension is called for. The kinds of writing which students will be expected to do in the next two or three decades will require that they apply established practices of literacy to new modes. Rather than averting our eyes from cultural texts—because they are like Reading Literature, because time spent with their interpretation takes away from time spent with producing students’ texts, because that’s communication and English studies decided in the ‘50s not to do communication, because cultural texts seem to require political stances which may offend someone, or for other possible reasons—we need to find terms to connect those texts with the sort we want our students to produce.
For the purposes of this paper, I’m going to pass over some intriguing questions--whether there is such a thing as visual rhetoric, whether it works as verbal rhetoric does, whether images contribute to or compete with verbally expressed ideas—and move more directly to what can be drawn from attention to the visual which will contribute to a college writing class.