Visual Arguments

In the reading, the book begins by defining how to convert an idea from paper into a visual argument, starting with four key decisions, identifying your argument, your audience, medium, and the specific form. The argument is the meat of your paper; the audience is whom the author wants to catch and have read their argument; medium is a type of printed article that helps bolster the argument you are making, and the specific form is how you are organizing your paper. This chapter discusses why to include images with research papers, for example, if one is discussing the very heated argument of the drinking age, one might put a picture including the law, to show where the law is stated and have the picture evidence to back up the author.

            Throughout the course of this chapter, the author lists how to design an argument for different audiences, such as an academic audience, a public audience, a visual audience, and a technological audience. The author also explains how to format the writing for each type of audience, i.e. word choice, organization, etc.; such is the case that one would not make a photo essay for an academic audience, one would construct an abstract and could write a thesis or research paper to get the argument across to their audience. Consequently, the author continues to elaborate on how visual and verbal design elements are important to one’s audience, mainly because if the article/page in question is not visually appealing, many will not appreciate the article just from the first glance perspective, so making a page that is visually appealing is extremely important to the overall look of one’s work.

            A multimedia montage seems to be closely related to what we are embarking on in class, because as the book says, a multimedia montage involves the combination of numerous media, i.e. images, sound, writing, digital elements, etc. because we are combining multiple media types to change the world!