Oh the rhetoric I have learned

I read Daniel Keller’s chapter about thinking rhetorically because, as an undergrad, I took a rhetoric class where we focused more on the placing, coloring, spacing, etc. of objects. As I would sit through this course I would wonder why we were learning this, why we were spending our time looking at adds from Cosmopolitan or GQ. After looking at images we would then look at ads online. It was Christmastime so there were many ads to analyze. Little did I know I would end up taking much more from the course than those who sat through lectures on Plato and Aristotle. At the end of the course we were asked to compile a project where we looked at an event rhetorically. We had to look at everything that was happening around us, from what people wore, how they interacted, the setting of the event, the placement of objects, and many more. While this article focuses more on creating your own video to be viewed rhetorically, I think what I did in class was also a multimodal assignment because we were constantly viewing images and analyzing them.

The videos Keller refers to are viewed on a more complex level than what I was asked to do in class. They looked at camera angles, where and why voice over’s occurred, why images fade in and out in certain ways, and the music and images used. As he writes, it is much harder to sit and write about the videos Beth and Dan created because there is so much occurring in such a short amount of time. This certainly makes me think back on my class. At times we would spend our hour and fifteen minute class looking at only two or three images. You become so involved in why images appear how they do, why things are placed where they are, and the conclusions you draw that it becomes very easy to discuss a single image for a very long time. When discussing a tv ad as opposed to a print ad we would view the add a few times before discussing initial impressions then we would rewatch the ad when people would bring up specific things from the ad. We would sometimes spend a whole class or even more on a single tv ad.

As I think now about multimodality and why we use it, I think now of how in-depth and informative a paper I could have written about a single print or tv ad. Especially tv ads, where in a short 30 second clip you have some much to look at and even the things you did not look at, like sounds and music. For my students I will definitely do something that deals with seeing images rhetorically. I think taking one image and showing them just how much they can dissect it will hopefully help them see that they can do this in many other things. Even having them create something multimodal that the class can then share and analyze would really help them see things rhetorically. To be honest, I never thought, once I stepped out of that class that I would ever use what I did in that course again (because I really didn’t feel that I learned anything) but I’ve come to see that I learned more in that class than I did in others where I simply sat and listened to lectures and took notes. It’s a very nice revelation.