Overview

From charts, texts, and graphs to illustrations, icons, and screens, we live in an information age saturated with visual language. Yet the underlying principles that provide structure for visual language have long eluded scholars of rhetoric, design, and engineering. To function as a language that reliably conveys meaning, visual language must embody codes that normalize its practices among both the designers who employ it and the readers who interpret it. In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication--text design, data displays, illustrations--is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, and a broad array of historical and contemporary examples, Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions explores the processes by which conventions evolve and proliferate and shows how conventions serve as the medium that designers use to shape, stabilize, and streamline visual information. Kostelnick and Hassett extend contemporary theories that define rhetoric as a social act, arguing that visual conventions also thrive within discourse communities and are fragile forms that vary widely in their longevity and scope. Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions is a thorough guide for scholars, teachers and practitioners of rhetoric and business and technical communication and for professionals in engineering, science, design, and business.

Full Product Details

Author:   Charles Kostelnick ,  Michael Hassett
Publisher:   Southern Illinois University Press
Imprint:   Southern Illinois University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 25.40cm
Weight:   0.685kg
ISBN:  

9780809325023

ISBN 10:   0809325020
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   31 October 2003
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Reviews

Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett have written a useful and informative book that explores the relation of textual conventions of all sorts to the visual display of information. . . . [Shaping Information] significantly enlarges how we think about conventions, and it will influence its readers to reconsider the arts of visual rhetoric. -- Stephen A. Bernhardt, Rhetoric Review [Shaping Information] is a useful and important part of the discussion of visual communication. . . . This is a book worth reading and re-reading. -- Susan N. Smith, Information Design Journal Document Design Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett provide[s an] accessible and welcome [addition] to the previously slim selection of book-length studies exploring the processes by which designers shape-and readers or users interpret-visual communication. . . . Shaping Information [is a] fascinating [study] that promise[s] to enrich the teaching and study of visual communication now and in the future. -- Bege K. Bowers, Technical Communication Quarterly Kostelnick and Hassett have written a sound and much needed book. Their framework for visual convention not only organizes unexplored territory in visual theory but also provides a theoretical system and structure of convention that can be used by theorists of writing. Their book makes a satisfying and thoroughly convincing case for the rhetorical basis of visual design. --David Kaufer, Journal of Business and Technical Communication

Author Information

Charles Kostelnick, a professor and chair of the Department of English at Iowa State University, is a coauthor, with David D. Roberts, of Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Michael Hassett is Director of Implementation at Envision Technology Solutions in Midvale, Utah. He has taught at Brigham Young University and is the author of numerous articles on rhetoric and the teaching of writing.

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