Concluding Thoughts

For me, these signs and these images are so powerful because they stir up my emotions. It is easy to ignore someone talking to you on the side of the street, easy to turn off the television when something comes on that you don’t want to hear. But for some reason, our eyes are drawn to these images. For WBC, they claim their goal through protesting is to educate, but in reality, they create, for the most part, anger. They are able to create strong feelings in us and they can move us into action. In fact, many of WBC’s protests have sparked people to counter-protest. The counter-protesters come armed with their own signs (see picture below).

Sourcec: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-3o-best-anti-westboro-baptist-church-protest-s

When counter-protesters come in to the picture, it is as if a visual discourse has started. The protesters are communicating, not only with their audience, but with each other through their signs. They have created a form of a discourse community (Borg 398).

Lawrence J. Prelli states that visual rhetoric is “ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture and, thus, [has] become the dominant rhetoric of our time (Herrick 270).” I agree with Prelli. Through this research paper, I have found that there is so much to study about visual rhetoric. We see so much and each thing we see can be analyzed; everything carries a meaning. Specifically in our changing world, the way we communicate is changing and visual rhetoric is becoming a field that will be necessary to study.