Throughout this analysis, Kostelnick makes several claims about visual rhetoric more generally and visual graphical representation more specifically
- “Visual language develops within discourse communities that enculturate its members in its conventional codes, and those codes embody cultural values and norms, including aesthetics. These social factors are inherently rhetorical because they profoundly influence how, at a given historical moment, communities use visual language to achieve certain ends” (215-6).
- “Design is inherently rhetorical because its forms are largely negotiated and shared by groups of users, or visual discourse communities…By socially constructing design forms, visual discourse communities create, codify, and perpetuate conventional practices, which engender expectations among its members” (218).
- “This process of enculturation creates rhetorical efficiency as well as poses an interpretive problem because readers come to regard conventional forms as natural, direct representations of fact unmediated by the artificial lens of design” (225).
- “Visual language is also rhetorically charged because designers deploy it in specific situations to achieve certain ends. In a given situation the designer can deploy visual language to foreground or embed information, help readers organize it, speak with a certain tone, foster credibility, and perform other functions that influence readers’ interpretations… [So] designing information so that readers can comprehend and retain it is scarcely an objective, neutral process” (226-7).
- “Visual arguments can also be advanced on the basis of how much, if at all, data are actually visualized. Designers control what is and what is not visualized, and that control has rhetorical consequences” (321-2).