Mary E. Hocks

Digital writing environments are hybrid settings in which words and visuals have a complex relationship in a field that is at once visual, spatial and verbal. This environment leads to “internetworked writing” which weaves together invention, collaboration, publication and consideration of audience into visual rhetorical production.

Visual/digital rhetoric is often devalued or misvalued as “easier” than classical rhetoric, but it actually introduces “a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audiences and institutional contexts, but it focuses on multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communication and information technologies” (340).

Key features of visual/digital rhetoric need consideration in both critiquing and designing visual/digital rhetorical performances, including audience stance and creator ethos, transparency of modalities relating to existing technologies, and hybridity or combining of modalities (visual, verbal, spatial, aural, gestural).

Web page design, as an example of a multimodal rhetorical performance, in addition to engaging the aforementioned features of visual/digital rhetoric, also has built-in relationships with the rhetorical situations genre and forum, as the web page genre dictates publishing online to authenticate the rhetorical performance, adding to the creators’ ethos as the web page becomes indicative of (collective) personal pride and (collective) self-image (nods to Hocks nods to J. Berlin’s social-epistemic).