ABSTRACT
In 1950, Kenneth Burke defined rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic
means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature use symbols” (p. 43, my
emphasis). In those days, the media were largely populated by words-in sound
transmitted by telephone and radio, or print in newspapers and books. However,
in succeeding decades, developments in technology made television, news-
magazines, and picture-intensive newspapers the norm. The personal computer
further accelerated the incidence of visual communication; in the last 15 years, the
dissemination of desktop publishing and Web authoring software has brought the
opportunity for nearly everyone in industrialized countries to combine verbal and
visual symbols into texts for a variety of purposes.2 At the professional level,
however, because of the expertise required to produce professional verbal-visual
communication, from newspapers to workplace documents to advertisements,
we see writer-artist collaboration more widespread than ever, in turn creating
the expectation in “readers” for more high-quality verbal-visual documents.
