Visual Rhetorical Analysis

Tanner Mettner

English 250

2/12/14

Visual Rhetorical Analysis

            Communication in the business world is a very broad topic to be talking about. The extent communication is used in the business world is too big to understand, so I will focus the topic more on the big group meetings. In my visual that I got from a 2014 LBA Minority Women’s Business Conference, you can see that there is many people in one room with a central person talking to all of them at once. This is called a “Business Conference” in the business world and is the most widely used form of communication in this aspect of my major. These conferences include a wide variety of topics to use, from sales numbers to economic efficiency, but they all have one main goal, and that is to inform the masses by getting them together and discussing the goal at once.

            As you can see in the photo there is a woman on a big screen with a bunch of other colors and symbols around her to demonstrate the probable topic of the conference. In this particular conference for the Latin Business Association is women in the workplace and is supported by the evidence of a woman leading the conference in the front of the room and the high amount of women in the room. When business men and women come to a conference there is many things for the company to discuss and teach their employees and that’s why they get as many people in a room as possible, the main purpose is so that it reduces the “Telephone Effect”. The telephone effect is the impreciseness of your memory over time and that if you were to teach or spread the news of the conference, that it would be distorted or altered. That effect is eliminated by a conference like the one shown in my visual. With that being said, business conferences are as important for companies as they are for employees!

            In this case, this conference is sponsored by an association for women and the people attending are different company officials. This conference is a very informal conference as you can see by the lack of suit and ties in the visual, which means that it intends to inform friendly and very basic information to company officials to implement into the business themselves. The evidence from that is the lack of any formal types of note taking, examples being a pad notebook or laptops. With that being said, the formal conference in the business world requires that there is some sort of note taking or memorization process because the information being shared is important and is very imperative that it be remembered and distributed throughout the company. The informality of this also shows there’s more of a friendly connotation to this conference, which leads to my next point.

            Saying that, conferences are more than just a way to distribute information they are there to get the company’s name out there too. Whoever took the picture of this visual, also can be known as the author of this photo. The author obviously wanted to show the popularity and friendliness of this conference. That is seen in this picture as the lady on the projector screen with a greeting smile and such a friendly informal order of the building too. Anything that seems very laid back and friendly is appealing to a lot of people in business and the world in general, and that’s what I think the author was trying to demonstrate with this picture.

            In this form of communication, visuals are more important than words. Conferences in a way control the morale of current employees or try to invoke feelings of camaraderie or teamwork for future or prospecting employees. It’s no different in this conference, the pictures of skyscrapers and beautiful sky can be conveyed as showing success or happiness. The evidence behind that is, if the company were to put a picture of ugly slums and a rainy sky in the background, it would change the whole mood and setting of the conference. Visuals will always create more emotion and have more of an effect on a person than words will in a conference. That’s why it is important to have very bright and promising images in conferences. The colors that are mostly used in and that are shown in this visual are blue, white, and red. All these colors are vibrant and are physiologically proven to provoke feelings of success and excitement in humans.

"LBA WBC." Latin Business Association , 14 Apr. 2014. Web. 8 Feb. 2014. <http://www.lbausa.com/wp-content/uploads/minority-woman-business2.jpg>.