Entry #3: What we use in our everyday life
Have you ever seen a post on social media, stopped and tried to figure out what it’s trying to tell you? This is what visual rhetoric is. Every day we use visual rhetoric without realizing it. I engage with visual media on my phone, through social media such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, and I’m pretty sure you do too. I have never really thought about visual rhetoric before. I’ve learned about it in high school and done some essays about it like rhetorical appeals like pathos, ethos, and logos but haven’t really paid attention to it in real life.
Visual rhetoric is what authors and people use to persuade their audience or to make them feel some way and they communicate with them through visuals and writings. We see and use visual rhetoric in our everyday lives without even realizing it. According to Roger Williams University, “You might not have thought about it before, but something as simple as a stop sign is an example of visual rhetoric. The visual cue of the red octagon at the end of the street tells you to stop, even before you read the letters.”
Another example of not realizing it, is when I watched a short clip of The Conjuring on YouTube. If you haven’t watched the movie, I highly recommend it! In this scene, the mom plays this game called “Hide and Clap” with her daughter where one person must be blindfolded and the other person must hide and clap whenever the seeker (blindfolded person) shouts for a clap so they can find them. In this scene, the mom is the seeker and when she goes into one of the bedrooms, she can hear the closet door slowly opening. She then asks for a clap, and we can see the hands slowly come out of the closet and start to clap. As I was watching this scene, I felt scared because the music started getting scary and because of that detail, I knew that it wasn’t her daughter and instead, it was something supernatural. The daughter then comes into the room and tells her mom that she was hiding somewhere else. We can see the mom look a little frightened when she realized that it wasn’t her daughter inside the closet. The visual rhetoric in this scene was the suspense, and it was used to create fear for the audience. The dim lighting of the room, the scary music, and the mom’s facial expressions and realization that it wasn’t her daughter who clapped made me feel invested in the movie and scared. I hadn’t even realized the visual rhetoric of that scene until I started writing this blog.
We are so used to reading labels on products that we don't even realize how much we are influenced by them. A good example is CeraVe. They involve certain types of fonts, colors, and phrases to gain customers' trust and persuade them to buy the products. According to Wikipedia, "each choice, be font, color layout, represents a different message that the author wants to portray for the audience." For example, on CeraVe's lotions, phrases like "#1 Dermatologist recommended" can be seen in all caps and bolded. This helps them gain people's trust and persuades them to buy their products. Same with the phrase "Rich Texture." The colors they use are plain and not at all crazy, which gives a calm and clean feeling. This helps people to see CeraVe as a safe and reliable skincare brand.
All in all, visual rhetoric is everywhere, from movies like The Conjuring, to products like CeraVe. It can be very helpful because it makes us feel emotions and influences our choices. Visual rhetoric involves ethos, logos, and pathos. From my examples, we can see how each one is used. For example, in The Conjuring, pathos is used because the audience feels scared for most of the movie. For CeraVe's design, both logos and ethos are there because of their list of ingredients and the phrase "#1 Dermatologist recommended." I think that it’s interesting that it’s used in almost everything we see.
Comments
Post a Comment