The texts we were assigned to read this week all had their own take on rhetoric. The first text was a comic with a lot of visual text, while the second reading was full of text but explaining what visual rhetoric was.

Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing contained a lot of references to ancient Greece and how it was viewed in the past time. It shows how Plato held negative views on rhetoric. He believed it “taught students to deceive” rather than better themselves. I can see where Plato comes from but with our knowledge today, we need to do something to convince others and persuade those of our views. Most commonly, we try to show the person we are persuading that we understand their ideas and come back with a counter argument.

Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments showed how we see rhetoric every day. Most commonly online, we don’t even realize what we see is visual rhetoric until we learn to acknowledge what we view and break it down ourselves. I think visual rhetoric is very useful nowadays due to the way we are raised in society now. Everything is quick and concise, or people will lose interest. People don’t want to read large texts to get the point, and the visual and technological era are upon us and I don’t think it’s going anywhere any time soon.