Journal 3

My artifacts include a photograph, an advertisement, and an infographic. They highlight the compositional technique of layout. Layout is very important in rhetoric. In order for a work to be rhetorical, it needs to be both effective and persuasive. Layout is paramount to achieving these. If a reader has a difficult time understanding or evaluating a work due to a cluttered or incomprehensible layout, whether it is a text or a visual design, he or she will quickly move on to something else, making the piece ineffective and not persuasive in the least.

A trend can be observed when analyzing other classmates' artifacts and my own in that most are visual or artistic examples of media that demonstrate a key term. I think that this visual aspect will be valuable when everyone is assembling their exhibits because generally when viewing museum exhibits, we tend to focus first and most intensely on the visual aspects and later move on to the text to learn more.

Gladwell's article, "The Social Life of Paper," explains the necessity of material affordances, specifically paper. Through research, he realizes the connection between the mental and physical worlds that paper provides, making it a necessity for the workplace and for productive thought product. The mental connections that people make between notes, stacks of paper, and other material affordances provide the complete, developed story. Without this additional thought provided by physicality, information could be incomprehensible to outside parties. 

Edbauer's article highlights the importance of circulation in creating a rhetorical ecology. As texts move through time, generations, and different audiences, they develop new meaning that must be considered in equality with the meaning intended by the original author and interpreted by the original audience. Edbauer teaches that circulation enables the evolution of rhetorical meaning in a piece.

Wysocki’s article brings the point that the role of design is much more prominent in purely textual pieces than one would originally assume. She says, "The visual presentation of a page or screen gives you an immediate sense of its genre," and "All page- and screen-based texts are (therefore) visual and their visual elements and arrangements can be analyzed." These statements refer to the immediate knowledge regarding genre that we could determine when analyzing, for example, the text at the bottom of a movie poster. If we see this: 

... even without the rest of the poster attached, it is immediately apparent where the text is from due to its iconic design and spacing.