Visual Rhetoric

This week we spent a lot of time reading and discussing visual rhetoric. Visual rhetoric can come in a plethora of ways: TV commercials, print advertisements, pictures, movie posters, etc. Any way they come, they still aim to persuade you in some way, whether you realize it or not. The easiest to analyze are print ads and TV commercials, because the companies are always aiming to persuade the audience that their product is better than someone else's. This means that their use of ethos, pathos, and logos can become quite obvious if you take the time to actually pay attention to how the ad or commercial is affecting you. Pictures are a lot harder to analyze, because while you may be able to pick out things that appeal to your emotions or things that make the photographer credible, it is a lot harder to explain exactly why they made the picture like they did. To me it is a lot like analyzing poetry or a short story because you are not given a lot to go off of when trying to analyze the purpose behind their actions. It could go many different ways when deciding why a person made a picture darker or lighter, why they made it black and white instead of color, or why they took it at a specific angle. The only person who could tell you the exact answer is the author of the picture.