ENGL 6401-50 - FALL 2025

Having recently turned in my literature review, I will now turn to the relationship between technical drawings, diagrams, and illustrations and visual encyclopedias — a relationship not addressed by name. To be fair, there is much existing scholarship on technical, diagrams, and illustrations, given their importance clarifying and elucidating the anatomy, inner workings, and other aspects of various objects, items, and mechanisms. The techniques and visual rhetoric encoded in their usage is highly varied — cross-sections, cutaways, exploded-view drawings, and so on and so forth — and can be used to explain any subject matter that involves machinery, structures, or processeses (which is essentially all of them). Combined with increased demand for technical-communication deliverables and materials spurred by technological innovation (such as the Digital Revolution), and the modern landscape is awash in scholarship that not only analyzes, contextualizes, and discusses technical drawings, ...

After further consideration, I have finalized my topic and decided to exlore the visual rhetoric of visual encyclopedias — more specifically, the technical illustrations and the unique information they're designed to convey in an encyclopedic format. Given their unique nature and the array of details and tactics they employ — cutaways, cross-sections, color-coding, multiple angles, and so on and so forth — they promote certain engagement in conjunction with text, annotations, and other media that visual encyclopedias "fold" together to create a unique, multimedia whole for readers to peruse. Per the article title, my list of sources remains tentative and would benefit from others' input and recommendations. So far, they mainly concern technical illustration, design principles, and visual communication — sometimes in the context of pedagogical effectiveness, sometimes in the context of historical applications and examples. That said, while visual encyclopedias by the...

Recently, I glanced at a scholarly article concerning the visual rhetoric of design principles. Although I don't recall the title off the top of my head, I've always been fascinated by the incorporation into written and textual works (especially for pedagogical purposes), which has led me to an interest in the rhetoric of visual encyclopedias and their contents. As a kid, visual encyclopedias helped sate my artistic side by giving me all sorts of cool illustrations and diagrams to pour over, which were often labelled and annotated with all sorts of helpful information that pointed to specific items or parts of the images in question (though I either couldn't read or simply glossed over the main paragraphs and texts). Fast-forward to my twenties, and I'm still fond of this, yet have also paired it off with not just noticing the illustrations and diagrams on their own, but also the rhetorical and technical-communication dimensions that they're conveying. Potential are...