Visual arguments: Are they possible?

From working through this visual argument exercise, I have come to a greater appreciation of the difficulty of creating a visual argument.  For example, with my entry, I was very pleased to see that my classmates had caught the concept that I was trying to convey.  Indeed, they caught some of subtle features that I had included intentionally as well as a feature or two that I admitted were present but hadn’t noticed myself.  On the other hand, I wondered to what extent I had cheated by including a headline.  Classmates who offered more purely visual entries probably created a truer test.  I will admit that I struggled to grasp the complete argument in some of these cases.  However, other responders did much better at generating careful analyses with a high degree of plausibility.  I felt like going back and trying to make my analyses more thorough and finer-grained.  I felt that my comments may have left the impression that the display was lacking when, in fact, it was my analysis that was inadequate.  Nevertheless, for me, the experience demonstrated the challenges of creating a purely visual argument. Before going through this process, I did believe that visual arguments were possible.  I felt that Birdsell and Groarke’s example of the anti-smoking poster was a good case in point (311).  In fact, the short headline plus image was a model for my visual argument.  I also felt that Blair offered a good criteria for measuring whether a visual could be deemed an argument or not.  Yet when I tried to make all the connections between images and their connotations in the various collages posted by my classmates and tried to grasp the key proposition of each, I found it much harder than I had imagined.  I believe it is possible to use visuals for argument, but I have come to believe that most effective visual arguments are probably multimodal, harnessing the visual along with other modes to make the argument clear.