Visual Rhetoric: Demonstration and Narrative

Abstract

Visual rhetoric is a form of narrativity and storytelling. These skills are critical to client-centered legal practice. Storytelling connects all subject areas in the law, and extends far beyond the law to disciplines as varied as cognitive studies, brain science, and rhetoric and persuasion. Lawyers use stories as framing devices, organizational schema, and persuasive rhetorical methods to communicate the context and meaning of a client’s situation and to improve the communication, reception, and understanding of legal argument with a given audience. Most legal writing and advocacy study has focused on the facts section for narrativity and storytelling, but there is potential for advocacy through visual rhetoric in questions presented, introductions and summaries of the argument, and in the argument's explanation and application sections. This summary presentation of a work in progress will examine the use of visual rhetoric in legal advocacy.