UTD School of Arts and Humanities

Rhetoric Teachers' Handbook
The University of Texas at Dallas – School of Arts and Humanities

UTD Rhetoric Program Information

Rhetoric Primer

Bibliographies

Essence of Argumentation

Visual Rhetoric

Other Programs

Rhetoric 1302 - Course Description

Teaching Tips

Teaching Exercises

Classroom Technology

Scholastic Dishonesty

UTD Resources

Visual Rhetoric

Visual Rhetoric bibliography (Rebecca Moore Howard)

Examples of Visual Rhetoric

Visit "Writing Offshore" in LinguaMOO to see examples of text and image in a room. The Notes here were made from the Generic Note Object.

Visit the "Ghost Town" website where you can read, in words and pictures, a story by Elena, a Ukranian woman who grew up in Chernobyl before the nuclear accident on April 26, 1986 that now makes the town and surrounding area the most toxic place on the planet. Elena's father is one of the few scientists studying the remains of the accident and this gives her unparalled access to the area. She rides through this haunting and eerie "dead zone" on a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle, dosimeter in hand, taking photographs. Her images and written commentary create a powerful example of visual rhetoric.

Ghost Town website access: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

To Upload Images to UTD Webspace

Requires activation of UTD email account/user name/password
Use Fetch
apache.utdallas.edu
user name
password

Visual Rhetoric Essay Options

Your students have several options regarding how they produce and submit their visual rhetoric essay.

First, they may include it in a room they build within LinguaMoo, either as the descriptive text for that room or as a separate note within that room.

They may submit their visual rhetoric essay as a printed essay with the image of choice inserted into the text of the essay. This is very easy to do using Microsoft Word or other word processing programs.

NOTE: in order to include an image in a word processing document, the image must first be made available in digital format. If students download images from websites (with permission, see below) the images will already be in digital format. If students wish to use an image from the pages of a book, magazine, or other print source then they must scan the image and save the resulting file as a digital image. The Multimedia Lab, inside the McDermott Library computer lab has equipment to faciliate this undertaking.

Finally, students may create their own webpage(s) using their UTD computer accounts, or webspace available through other online sources, and place copies of any images they wish to use there. Any images used that represent the original work of others should be fully cited as copyrighted. See below.

Copyright Issues

The visual rhetoric project requires students to identify and work with a specific image. This image, whether in a print source or online, may be copyrighted and students must cite their use of that image, just as they would a book, an article, a newspaper report, etc.

For the proper format for citing an image, whether parenthetical (in the text of their essay) or in a Works Cited section, students should consult the course handbook.

They should also request and obtain permission to link to their image (if is is online) if there is any indication that the image is copyrighted. If the website containing the image is a public news site, have your students consult the copyright policy links found on that site.

If students wish to simply make a print copy of their chosen image and attach it to a hard copy of their visual rhetoric essay, they do not have to obtain permission for the use of the image.

If, however, they plan to place a copy of the image within an online site such as LinguaMOO, if they wish to upload a copy of the image file to their LRO portfolio, or if they wish to insert a copy of the image file within the file that constitutes their visual rhetoric essay they must obtain permission to use the image and include complete and appropriate information about the image in a separate Works Cited entry.