Bernhardt Summary

In Bernhardt’s essay, he describes two different texts: a non-visual and a visual text. He encourages that a writer should learn how to add visuals. “Instead of attempting to base teaching practice on scant and tentative results, we may find it more expedient to view the rhetorical of visual design as an evolving art” (75). Benhardt argues that teachers must teach students how to adjust their text visually. By doing this, students would learn how to organize the structure of their papers more efficiently. Visual texts may contain pictures and be defined by the choices of its words, space, paragraph separations, and margins. Benhardt explains that visual texts and non-visual texts have their own rhetorical purpose. An example he used was a fact sheet of the wetlands. This is a visual text. He states the paper “insured attention through the use of high quality, heavy weight paper, and crisp, well-defined print, qualities chosen to encourage the reader to notice it and keep the sheet” (71). Benhardt emphasizes that the appearance and structure is important when considering the rhetorical situation of a paper and that writers can more efficiently capture the attention of the reader by doing so. Students can learn rhetorical organization and become “creative composers” if teachers encourage visual aspects of a text.