The principles of visual rhetoric and the rhetoric of visual principles

Abstract

The basic insight of "Seeing the Text" is that as technical texts range through the continuum from the visually uninformative to those full of visible cues to their content, they change not just superficially but rather in linguistic and organizational ways that are very important rhetorically. Bernhardt advances this argument with a case study of a visually structured brochure, during which he appeals to four "laws of gestalt" to explain why the phrases, sentences, and subdivisions of the text have special "localized" features that improve their usefulness. Unfortunately, the graphics principles to which Bernhardt appeals are too vague (or sometimes insufficiently relevant) to do the explanatory job he assigns to them. A review of related work by Edward Tufte, Jill Larkin, and Herbert Simon, however, yields other principles of visual rhetoric (involving data-ink ratios and perceptual inferences) that are more relevant and specific, and that in fact entail just the localization features Bernhardt predicted. Thus, his claims about the pedagogic importance of appreciating visually informative text have been amply vindicated by parallel, independent studies on envisioning information effectively.