Cause and Effect and Visual Rhetoric

When I was in Junior High School I used to spend hours trying to solve a little 6 sided puzzle called a Rubik’s Cube. Anyone who has ever solved a Rubik’s Cube will understand cause and effect. As you move the colored sections on one side of it to get all the colors together, the sections of the puzzle on the opposite side move in the same fashion. This will mess up what you have done on the opposite side without careful planning. Since every change that you make on one side of the Rubik’s Cube effects the other side of it, you have to try and solve both sides of the puzzle at the same time taking into account the cause and effect. After I learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube have noticed that everything in the world has cause and effect, every action has a reaction. For Example: if you spend too much money on fun and games your do not have enough to pay the rent, or if school is not important enough to you when your you are younger you might still be going to college when your 40, and you could go on and on with examples since everything in the world has cause and effect. When cause and effect is applied to writing it is important to write about both the things that caused the event and effects that occurred after. By doing this it will help you to better communicate your point to your audience.

Visual rhetoric is also an important part of the writing process. Visual rhetoric is so effective because we are naturally drawn to it. Pictures attract attention and are very effective in making a point. Because of this pictures can be used instead of text to portray a message and are very effective in advertising. With billions and billions of images available to us visual rhetoric is very distracting. I hear reports all the time that state that we watch too much television, play to many video games and spend too much time in the internet all of which involve pictures. I can tell you that I personally have spent more time doing these things that I have spent reading and working on my education. Visual rhetoric is more than just pictures and videos. If you can describe a seen in such a way that it feels like a picture when you read it then you are using visual rhetoric. In some cases this can be more effective than a picture because you can allow your audience to make their own picture bases on the familial gazes, which will give them a personal tie to what it is that you are constructing. For example, when we read the essay Dolly Palmer wrote about camping in the first paragraph of The Social and Physiological Separation of Space in Weber Writes, it immediately took me to some of my most favorite camping spots and I could see them clear as day. I think it is an important skill to be able to write your text with cause and effect in it, and in such a way that it also has visual rhetoric. To be able to write this way is a very effective skill and a useful talent.