voi Cesown and students’ abilities. The reverse is also true: there is much work needed in
adopting visual metaphors to explain logocentric processes which no longer speak to
a wired generation. in ‘alternative pedagogy: Visualizing Theories of Composition’
(mullin 1998), students in a writing module were too imitative of others, adopted visual
vocabulary to assist with inventing, arranging, recalling, shaping and delivering their
writing. more rhetorical analysis that focuses on the visual students’ engagement with
image and word would illuminate art practitioners’ work and provide useful scholarship
to their and to others’ disciplines. a us architect provides a good example. unlike a
teacher in the humanities or in writing, when he notes students are too imitative of
an architect (having not yet developed their individual voices) he encourages them
to research the architect they have emulated; the more they study, the more they
learn what moves them, what vocabulary they might take from that architect and
how to express their own ideas (mullin 2009). Rhetorical research of visual styles can
encourage artistic visioning and appeals to the young self- focused artist- who- needs-
to- be- researcher. such scholarship at university level can start with what one knows,
expects, sees and feels in response to what one likes, and then provide tools and
language^6 to articulate what draws them, and in turn, how they might ‘draw’, how their
terministic screen is shaping what they vision. This approach can develop into richer,
deeper scholarship at postgraduate levels.
applying rhetorical analyses to the words of artists provides another method for
understanding and shaping visual practices and the processes of those who create and
teach art practices. The interviews of art practitioners opened up for them the need for
linking current issues of intellectual property to the tradition and practices of building
on, and borrowing, in art (mullin 2009). By asking what they own or borrow in their
art and their obligation to acknowledge collaboration, and by examining the language
of acknowledgement in art, practitioners found alternative ways to address these issues
for their students as well as themselves. likewise, colleagues and i interviewed students
about their creative and compositional practices in their art, and then asked the same
questions about their alphabetic writing practices. analyses provided a window to the
personal, constructed ground on which students position themselves in each medium
and their practices, in rhetorical terms, for successful ‘invention’, use of ‘memory’ and
final ‘delivery’ (orr et al. 2005). Researching their visual and rhetorical practices, and
the commonalities and gaps between them, leads to a greater understanding of how to
support and foster each. however, it also illuminates for art practitioners the value of
conducting rhetorical research for the purposes of creative production and knowledge
making.
Cheryl Jorgensen- earp examines how oral and print rhetoric surrounding the legal
issues of the salvaging of the Titanic, affected public reaction to and, eventually, public
memory of the site itself – that is, she studied the rhetorical effect of all elements
leading to an exhibition. instead of becoming an untouched, sacred graveyard in the
ocean, proponents of salvaging and exhibiting ‘countered with a cluster of secularizing
metaphors that delegitimized the presumptive view of the Titanic as gravesite
and substituted an alternative set of thoughts and actions’ that became crucial to
determining the way in which materials from the ship were displayed. ‘By co- opting
the sacralizing metaphors, the [Titanic] exhibitors resisted characterization as defilers
of sacred ground and sought post hoc legitimacy for the secular interests underlying the