I found a story in the NY times with substantial visual imagery that helped the author convey the desired emotions in her readers. It’s an article about the fire that recently occurred in Brazil’s National Museum. The most unfortunate part of this incident was that it was due to government neglect and disregard to warnings. The main message of this article is to inform the readers of the incident, but it is also to provoke a sense of compassion and sympathy. The article comes with an image of two women, who happen to be employees, in a very heart wrenching embrace with the burned down museum sealed off with the yellow caution tape around it. As I previously learned in “Understanding Rhetoric: A graphic guide,” the concept of pathos is used to invoke feelings like pity and fear and is clearly conveyed in the author’s way of writing this story. Aristotle emphasized ethos as being one of three concepts of a good communicator. Ethos also plays a part in this article because the author is a newspaper journalist and it adds a layer of credibility. The concept of logos can also be applied here where the author explains that the lack of maintenance and the disregard of warnings was the main cause of the museum fire. Using ideas from the reading of Hock’s, I can also see the application of those concepts in this article. Audience stance is used to highlight visual rhetoric where the author of the article encourages participation by incorporating an image and making the article more attractive. Transparency, which is how writers make the interface of their work feel more familiar and recognizable, is also demonstrated since the newspaper layout is easy to navigate for readers and very familiar at this point. The combination of the image and the text is an example of the third concept which is hybridity or combining visual and writing texts. I found that this article fully embraces the concepts of visual rhetoric and how they can be applied to a writing environment.
#week2
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