Visual Rhetorical Analysis In Oral Communication

Assignment four, visual rhetorical analysis, helped me develop oral communication skills. For this assignment, we were asked to deliver a presentation, and it was also the first official presentation that we made in front of the whole class in this course. To prepare for this presentation, I first referred to the paper I wrote for the topic, which was warning biohazard, and tried to take out the thesis and main points,then, based on the thesis and main points, I wrote an outline of the presentation. Next thing was creating a powerpoint. After that was just practicing. Through this assignment, I learned that transition words was important to make it easier for your audience to follow, an interesting and neat introduction was a good technique …show more content…
The main purpose of assignment four was to analyze the picture and discussed how the author use the color, organization, chunking etc. to express the messages. By analyzing other person’s work, I learned that different color has different meaning. For instance, in the visual that I chose, the author used black and white to form a contrast, which implied evil and good. He also chose red to emphasis letter A, T, C, and G to give audiences hint that the topic was related to DNA and biology. Furthermore, I also found out that organization was significant for visual. For instance, in the warning biohazard, the author organized the whole subjects within a cross shape, and put the black hands in the middle of the picture. The cross shape indicated the medical assistance and black hands implied human doing experiment with contaminated hands. The things I learned from visual rhetorical analysis can be applied to creating powerpoint, because it taught me the skills of choosing decent images and appropriate colors. For instance, when I was creating powerpoint for assignment five, since my topic was about how to make a city sustainable, I chose color blue as my background indicating the blue sky, and I used a lot of green color in my texts and pictures to imply plants and nature. In terms of choosing pictures, I picked several intuitive pictures to encourage audiences to think, such as the …show more content…
To be specific, I learned adding page numbers, doubling line spacing, and formatting academic essay etc. which I weren’t familiar with. Also, I learned formatting powerpoint slides, changing themes and font of words, and adding different types of transition between each slides etc. One principle rule of making effective powerpoint for presentation that I learned through this course was that never put too many images or texts on one slide, because that way the audiences will be distracted and won’t pay attention to your talking. When I was preparing the powerpoint for assignment 5, considering the essay was documented essay, which meant there were many information, I put large chunk of texts. After applied the principle rule, I shorten each point to a short sentence or phrases. For example, in my conclusion slide, I summarize all the information into four phrases that were improving mass transit, boosting clean energy, making buildings more efficient, and upgrading power infrastructures. Personally, I believe those skills are all useful in the future and can be taken away to my other