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This essay illustrates key features of visual rhetoric as they operate in two professional academic hypertexts and student work designed for the World Wide Web. By looking at features like audience stance, transparency, and hybridity, writing teachers can teach visual rhetoric as a transformative process of design. Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important pedagogy of writing as design.
Scholarship in rhetoric and composition has begun to emphasize the central role of visual rhetoric for writers, especially those working in digital writing environments. Visual rhetoric, or visual strategies used for meaning and persuasion, is hardly new, but its importance has been amplified by the visual and interactive nature of native hypertext and multimedia writing. The early developers of hypertextual writing as well as the scholars who study the effect technologies have on readers and writers in various settings have all influenced our understanding of how multimedia technologies use visual rhetoric. Since the appearance of hypertext and other interactive new media, these digital writing environments make it difficult to separate words from visuals or privilege one over the other.1 Interactive digital texts can blend words and visuals, talk and text, and authors and audiences in ways that are recognizably postmodern.2 Hypertext theorists and software designers Jay Bolter and Michael Joyce emphasized this visual and experimental character of digital hypertextual writing when they created the hypertext writing program Storyspace. Richard Lanham emphasized the rhetorical nature of digital writing, defining a "digital rhetoric" that recaptures the rhetorical paideia by making explicit oral and visual rhetorical concerns that were buried in the last two centuries of print culture and conventions (30). More recent scholarly work outlines the rhetorical practices possible with hypertext and multimedia, from Gary Heba's delineation of how html authoring mirrors rhetorical processes for composition to Patricia Sullivan's arguments that expand our definitions of electronic writing to include graphics, screen design, and other media forms. While professional writers rarely complete an entire interface or graphic design, early work in professional and technical communication by James Porter and Patricia Sullivan, Edward Tufte, and Barbara Mirel all demonstrated how rhetorical decisions impact the visual design of an online document or system: this work helped alert composition scholars to...