Faculty Focus: What's Happening at USA?

This month, PETAL had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Nicole Amare (English) in regard to her work on “visual rhetoric” and how that might apply to classroom teaching, particularly in regard to using PowerPoint. It should be noted that Amare has collaborated with Alan Manning at Brigham Young on most of her work in this area.

Amare’s work on visual rhetoric is based on the work of philosopher C. S. Peirce and provides some valuable insight (and advice) into the way faculty use and should use graphics in presentation slides. She contends that in all forms of visual communication, from document design to PowerPoint, the text and graphics work together to form a “common visual-language system,” which has its own set of shared meanings and interpretive contexts.

The primary value of this system, which she calls “visual rhetoric,” is that it leads us to think about graphics and text as part of one signifying system. This is to say that the graphics we choose to put on a slide convey meaning in the same way that words on the slide do, and the more cognizant we are of this, the better we’ll be able to communicate meaning through our use and choice of both graphics and text.

The words we choose to put on a slide (or in an essay) are, of course, a vitally important part of the content, or meaning, of that slide, but Amare argues that the formatting and presentation of those words are essential to the readability of the text, which leads us to the realization that we should actually think of written text as a kind of “informative graphic” that is ultimately no different than a graph, chart, or photograph in its communication of meaning.

What is perhaps most interesting in Amare’s work, however, is that she argues that the visual choices we make when presenting information are largely ethical choices.

To make this argument, she employs Peirce’s typology of rhetorical goals, which consists of three basic goals:

1. To evoke feelings
2. To provoke action
3. To promote understanding.

She has translated these goals into visual terms so that visual strategies that evoke feelings are referred to as decoratives; visual strategies that provoke action are called indicatives; and visual strategies that promote understanding are informatives. Ethical questions arise when decorative or indicative elements interfere with the informative purpose of the message. 

Amare argues that the tendency of most presenters is to choose visuals that serve as decoratives and indicatives rather than as informatives. She attributes this to the very nature of how PowerPoint is marketed, which privileges “image marketing” over “knowledge making” and “truth sharing.” This is further exacerbated by the way the graphics tools in PowerPoint make it easy to overcomplicate graphics with irrelevant detail so that their informative value is compromised.

Therefore, when an instructor over-decorates his slides with fancy fonts, clipart, and animations, the audience’s focus is pulled away from the important goal of communicating the meanings of the instructional content being delivered to an inferior (and less desirable) goal of pleasing them aesthetically.

For Amare, if the goal of a presentation is complete understanding on the part of the audience, any use of visuals because they look impressive rather than because they contribute to understanding is a serious ethical breach.

In the end, Amare points out that no single visual can be said to be inherently unethical (or ethical), but rather that the ethics of a particular visual are entirely dependent on its intended use or goal.

Finally, Amare also had some very interesting things to say about PowerPoint in general.

It’s interesting that people want to be given lists, but they simply don’t learn from lists.  In fact, there was an article in the Harvard Business Review a few years ago that said people learn best with narrative.  And Peter Norvig said that PowerPoint can help good speakers do better but poor speakers do worse.

There was actually a professor at Stanford who refused to teach a particular book because it wouldn’t PowerPoint well.  I think that’s unethical!

Editor’s Note: This article is intentionally a vast oversimplification of both Peirce’s and Amare’s work.  To pursue this issue more fully, we highly recommend the following articles by Drs. Amare and Manning:

Amare, N., & Manning, A. (2007). IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 50(1): 57-70.

Manning, A., & Amare, N. (2007). Technical Communication 53(2): 195-211.

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