Multimodal Rhetoric

The course offers a rhetorical approach to effective multimodal communication, looking in particular into the integration of visual rhetoric (moving and static images, including graphics) and verbal rhetoric (spoken and written words, including text layout). Students will be introduced to the persuasive design of multimodal messages through a rich palette of case studies: online newspapers’ “front page” organization, advertising (print media, TV and Web), corporate financial reporting and corporate social responsibility reporting (print and web based). Students will learn to look at multimodal content with a rhetorical/design attitude asking why they are constructed in a certain way. Moving from cross-modal processes of meaning construction (e.g. visual and verbal metaphor) and of discourse organization (narrative, argumentation), the course defines a set of basic persuasive design prototypes. Prototypes are then considered within contextualized rhetorical strategies adapted not only to the audience, but to all the relevant organizational stakeholders and to material constraints.