What I found most fascinating about Hill’s essay was the part about vividness and the debate over whether or not it enhances persuasiveness. The most fascinating part was when Hill states that “Vividness itself, like any single persuasive trait, will not make a bad argument convincing, but it will, if properly employed, enhance the persuasiveness of a reasonably strong position” (32). This concept may seem very obvious and simple, but I think it is pretty fascinating how an image can be extremely vivid, but unless the position behind it is strong, the image lacks the ability to persuade.
What Hill most clarified for me about how rhetorical images affect a viewer is his explanation of the concept of presence on page 29. Hill explains how, like with vividness, a rhetor cannot create presence where there is none, but he can “endow the elements in the situation that are favorable to the rhetor’s case with as much presence as possible” (29). It makes sense when he talks about giving an image enough presence that when it is processed in the viewer’s mind it crowds out any other considerations. Hill makes it very clear that an image carries presence because it can be directly perceived, therefore linking presence and visual perception of rhetorical images.
What I never realized before reading this essay is how statistics are considered the least vivid form of information. It does kind of make sense but I always thought people and non-profit organizations who try to make an appeal to others’ emotions will use not only images of a starving child, for example, but they will also share statistics like “In the world, a child dies every 5 minutes from malnutrition” (I made up that statistic). I guess it depends on how the statistics are used that makes them more or less vivid but I would have thought statistics would be more vivid than an abstract, impersonal analysis because statistics tend to hit the viewer harder. Again I realize Hill talks about the fact that images hit harder means they also do not have as much of an ability to change peoples’ minds. This shows how it all just really depends on the point being made and the way in which the vivid or non-vivid information is being used.
What I don’t quite understand still is Hill’s punch line when it comes to emotions and how/why they are evoked by rhetorical images. Does he agree with the “conventional wisdom” he alludes to on page 26, which states that representational images mainly prompt emotional reactions that override rational faculties? He argues that emotional response, along with vividness and persuasion all work together to make rhetorical images so powerful, but he seems to use so many different viewpoints on how much emotional response is a factor that I got confused and am not clear on what his viewpoint is.
