Abstract

One of the most important tools for communication, the Internet, is rapidly becoming more image- than text-oriented. Scholars must proceed in evaluating readability of both text and images on educational websites. These scholars must have good visual memory and strong intuitive-associative thinking skills (Eshet-Alkali & Amichai-Hamberger, 2004). Images should no longer be reduced to a discussion of verbal grammar (Dondis, 1973) or idealizing and praising images as holistic truths (Mitchell, 1986). Scholarship is beginning to correct this dichotomizing tendency, by intertwining how we construct and analyze text and image for a particular reader, at a particular time in history, implementing visual rhetoric (Hocks & Kendrick, 2005). This paper explores how rhetoric is now synonymous with the term communication (Foss, 2004; 2005), and is a mode of pedagogy that can be used as a tool for, and subject of, classroom pedagogy. This way of thinking is important, as visuals are quickly displacing the linguistic in social importance (Ott & Dickinson, 2009), especially in the design of websites on the Internet.