Instructor Note
This lesson plan offers instructions for a 20-30 minute activity in which students are challenged to rhetorically analyze a Greenpeace infographic about longline fishing. The activity assigns a different part of the infographic to each small group, so that they can analyze its visual rhetoric and report back to the whole class. The goal of the activity is to provide students with practice in matching visuals to their rhetorical purposes. This activity is designed to follow the slide deck titled “To Visualize or Not?”
Lesson Plan
In groups, students will examine this infographic from Greenpeace (used here for educational purposes as permitted by Greenpeace’s copyright and permissions policy.) This activity is designed to follow the slide deck titled “To Visualize or Not?”
First, ask students: what is the rhetorical situation? Who is the author? The audience(s)? What is the author’s exigence?
Then ask: what is it trying to convince people of? What is it trying to teach (beyond the facts listed)? Groups should discuss for 2-3 minutes, followed by a full-class follow-up to make sure everybody agrees on the image’s main rhetorical purposes (i.e., to teach viewers what longline fishing is and get them to reject it).
Then, assign each group one section of the image, A through K. (The slideshow above contains a view of the original image, then a split-up view showing parts A through K, then zoomed images of each individual piece.)
Have each group of students answer the following questions with regard to their own assigned piece of the infographic, and be ready to explain and defend their answers in a full-class discussion, as follows:
- What would you call this piece of the infographic? A data visualization? A schematic or explanatory image? An attempt at pathos? Or a decoration?
- What’s this piece of the image for, and how important is it to the whole? Is it too visually prominent for its importance? Not visually prominent enough? Or just about right?
- Brainstorm at least two other ways to convey the same idea (visually or not).
- Make a recommendation to the infographic’s designers. What changes, if any, should be made to this piece? Should it be resized, changed into a different type of image, moved, reworded, or deleted altogether?
In a full-class follow-up, groups present their findings on the first three questions and explain and defend their design recommendations.
Instructor guide to class discussion
Nothing in this infographic qualifies as a data visualization, because nothing on the chart represents quantitative information visually. We see things that look like data visualizations, but they never use the length, area, color, angle, position, or number of visual elements to represent actual numbers.
- The 50 boat-shaped icons in section B could each represent 100 longline vessels, but no key indicates that they do. A ratio of 100 longline vessels per icon would represent the 5000 number printed in large font, but not to the actual estimated number, which is higher.
- The 32 fish-shaped icons in section E, 30 black and 2 blue, imitate a perfectly valid type of data visualization (an isotype, which represents quantities by reproducing an iconic image a certain number of times), but the colored fish don’t correspond to any real-world numbers at all.
- The two ships in section F are not to scale: 24 is less than half of 60, but the smaller boat is clearly more than half the length of the large one. And even if the ships were to scale, what would that communicate? The bottom ship represents the maximum vessel size, while the smaller ship represents “most” boats: how is that a helpful image?
- Every other combination of visuals and numbers on the infographic is merely decoration.
However, the overall image does accomplish some rhetorical goals.
- The image in section A is a type of schematic, a simplified diagram showing us how something works. It’s exaggerated, since dead fish and turtles likely wouldn’t line up like this in the actual water, but it does a pretty good job of A) communicating how longline fishing works, and B) making it look harmful. It packs an emotional punch.
- The infographic lists solutions in section H, but its visual focus is on the problem. It’s worth discussing with students the relative benefits and drawbacks of this approach (opinions may vary).