Visual Rhetoric: Topics of Invention and Arrangement and Tropes of Style

This Article discusses the rhetorical value of visual-graphical devices in legal discourse. Rhetoric, the art of persuasive communication, studies the available means to communicate with an audience in an effective, persuasive manner so as to achieve the author’s purpose in the context of a rhetorical situation. This Article joins a rapidly growing conversation on visual rhetoric — the use of graphic and pictorial imagery for effective, persuasive communication.

This Article will discuss the communicative power of visual-graphical works as rhetorical topics of invention and arrangement and tropes of style within contemporary legal rhetoric and modern argument theory. This work will demonstrate the potential power of the use of such devices in the context of the famous work of modern rhetoric, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” I imagine and attempt to create the letter that Dr. King might have written had he had access to a modern personal computer in his cell in Birmingham, and attempted to insert visuals to support his rhetoric.