Considering Visual Elements

In this blog post, I will be considering the visual aspect of my genre and public argument. I will be choosing some questions from Writing Public Lives that I feel is most relevant to my project.

Questions:

Creating Visual Coherence: Color Choices

1) What color choices best reflect the visual-rhetorical tone of my project?

• If I used a combination of cool and warm tones, than that will effectively reflect my rhetorical tone. I am trying to evoke empathy and sympathy for students, as well as raise awareness, and perhaps an emotional response, against Common Core. Red and blue colors will most likely echo this.

2) Thinking of my background color, what color should the font be in order to be readable and appropriate to the message of the project? 

• I have never seen anyone write an editorial and include a colored background, especially not in The New York Times. I will stick with the classic white background with black text, and incorporate the colors and tones into the imagery and other aspects of the text. 

Kostya Sasquatch. "Font." 07/30/2009 via Flickr.
Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic License. 

Font Choices

3) How might I vary the fonts used in my project for emphasis, such as the title and body of my project? 

• I will probably keep the same font throughout, but I will change the size. I will probably enlarge the font in the title and perhaps make some key words or phrases bold. I am debating whether or not to enlarge a quote's font, in order to emphasize it's meaning and make the editorial more visually appealing.

Creating Visual Salience: Image Selection

4) Is the feeling or tone that the image evokes appropriate to the visual-rhetorical tone of my argument? 

• The images that I plan to include in my editorial echo the tone of a certain idea that I want to present to my audience. I am planning on reflecting the feel of the rhetoric in images, that would evoke emotion and thought. 

5) If the image is a graph or chart, does it clearly support a major point of my argument, or is it superfluous? 

• The few charts and graphs that I hope to include are clearly reflections of the statistics and information that I was discussing in my writing. Instead of drawing away from a specific point, they seem to prove and establish authority and credibility for me and my information.

Creating Visual Organization:

6) Scan your public argument or your outline. Do your eyes move easily from section to section in the order that you intended? 

• As I have looked at other editorial examples, I know exactly what I want my editorial to look like. The article will be easy to scan and read over, if I break up text into smaller chunks (no more than 3-4 lines each) and include different media sources, such as images and videos.

7) Do too many visual images make your text busy and disorganized? If so, which images might you omit? 

• I have not already made a draft, but this question just serves as a reminder that too many images can set off the reader. While it is important to include media sources and break away from text, there should be no more than 4-5 in an editorial. I should focus on picking the ones that do the most for my argument and purpose, and omit the rest.

--Jenny Bello