The ‘Designing Arguments’ chapter clearly states the best ways to design arguments, how to compose them and how the decorum can add to an argument. This is very helpful in helping my group’s success in our multimodal assignment. The decorum, or “appropriateness,” will be very important in establishing our voice and persuasiveness in our project. We will want to use ornate language, formal structure and rhetorical devices. Decorum will be a crucial aspect to our group paper because we want to sound knowledgeable and authoritative. Integrating images into our paper will also be another tool to captivate our audience, something that this chapter illustrates nicely. The use of images and captions make the reader really stop and look at the image and read the caption, rather than just gazing over it. Combining visual and verbal design elements will also be an important tool we use in our multimodal project. We plan on using many visuals as well as strong verbal design and text. Figure 8.5 shows a very appealing poster with a ‘provocative headline.’ This is something we can use to capture our audience.
Visual arguments will be a huge part of my groups project. We want to captivate and continue the attention of our audience. We will need to decide on the purpose of our visual, identify the argument, determine whether to use pathos, logo, and ethos, and select strong images that will portray our message. Figure 8.6 is a captivating ad for The Body Shop, illustrating that there are millions of more women who don’t look like supermodels. This is an ad that certainly draws the audience in and is effective in its argument. Photo essay’s will also be useful in our project. As described in Chapter 8, a photo essay is something in which photographs, rather than print text, convey the argument. This will be key to making our argument believable. We will also clearly use a website. This will be essential to our project. We will allow the audience to explore the different features of it and continue to draw the audience in. My group and I will strive for consistency and creativity in every aspect of the visual aid. We will also be careful in deciding the relationship between the visuals and the text. The multimodal montage described in this chapter is the most essential thing to our project. This is where everything will come together. We want to think out of the box in order to create a range of persuasive possibilities to present to our audience. We will use images, sound, writing and digital elements to create our multimedia montage. This chapter has helped me think of more ideas and helped me to be creative with this project. There are so many different approaches, all of them using creativity, which will assist my group and me in making our multimodal project.
