Jacob Singleton

When asked to create something visual, my mind immediately jumped to some of my past work. My past “visual projects” have been very focused on delivering complex data in a way that will grab readers’ attention for The Daily Illini.

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I want this project to convey something I care about and think about daily, rather than a random, fleeting topic.

“No steps take you nowhere. Small steps take you somewhere.”

From the book The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

I think the exigence of this quote is obvious, but it’s something we often forget. Rather than focusing on the small steps we can take, we focus on how insurmountable a task seems.

It relates to another quote I like:

“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of excellence.”

Can’t remember

I have to tell myself this frequently. For example, I know my cover letters aren’t perfect. But it’s better to apply to jobs with an excellent cover letter than not apply to any at all because you’re afraid it’s not perfect.

The following screenshot is what I have so far. I want to add two people on the tracks to success (words), with their goals (a door with light) at the end. The top person is standing still, confused, and the bottom person is happy, taking small steps.

Is this a serious enough “argument?” Please like, subscribe, and leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Many prominent and famed rhetoricians known around the world for their eloquent feel experience the need, or even the intense, uncontrollable drive, to be extremely verbose when articulating their ideas, transforming and shifting even the most simple and mindless concepts into the most superfluous and often unintelligible notions. This extremely gratuitous extrocity, or the use of often dispensable and extraneous words and sentences to express a single thought, wastes and squanders an unbelievably large amount of time and energy, some hundreds of hours every year or annually per person, as it has for the past several thousand centuries.

In the year of MMXVI, or in layman’s terms, the year 2016, one of humanity’s finest, most reputable thinkers, a veritable savant of our times, introduced an unorthodox, novel, and rather unconventional idea:

Let’s break down this meme into two parts:

1. In this scene of The Office, Kevin decides to stop wasting time with extra words.
2. Colin Kaepernick is the former NFL quarterback who became famous for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism. Nike recently injected a political message into its marketing by layering a statement on top of Kaepernick’s face. The exigence of this ad is simple: Nike supports Kaepernick protesting racism by “believing in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”

Now that we know the context, we can understand the meme. While the meme is partially a joke, its exigence is to encourage rhetors to convey complex information clearly and simply.

Some teachers train students that only way to sound “smart” is to use lots of words. In the real world, “if you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it well enough.” (@Maria, this isn’t a dig on you at all — I appreciate that you don’t require a certain number of words on most assignments and that you explain the exigence of assignments!)

It’s a meme that both the rhetoric and audience can get behind, because most people just want to “get to the point.”

Maps are only useful to a certain extent

The main point of the Tyner reading was that maps are useful to a certain extent, but they have their limitations. To be useful, maps must omit some details from the real world. For example, when trying to get from the UGL to the Illini Union, seeing roads, sidewalks, and landmarks is useful, but seeing steam tunnels and sea level isn’t useful.

Maps are always changing

Monmonier’s reading had a few key takeaways: maps are always changing, maps can be biased, and maps can be inaccurate. In some parts of the world — especially parts with political turmoil — maps continually change. For example, South Sudan split off from Sudan while I was taking geography in high school. Czechoslovakia split in two in 1993, into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.Although most of the change has happened on the “other side of the world,” United States maps are still changing from non-political forces. In Aug. 2018, The New York Times brought to light how a relatively small group of people can practically change the map: Google has the power to rename neighborhoods, make new neighborhoods, and define borders.

Maps can be biased

Our bias, regardless of whether conscious or unconscious, plays into how we make maps. Every time cartographers make a map, they must take a side on the Israel/Palestine controversy. On the other hand, IKEA showed its unconscious bias when it named the East Sea the Sea of Japan, which ultimately caused them to stop producing all maps when many Koreans took offense.

Maps can be inaccurate

Lastly, most maps are inaccurate. When representing a 3D world on a 2D map, we must distort reality. Below are two representations of a 2D map: the argument of the left map is that area is more important than shape, and the argument of the right map is that shape is more important than area.

According Lloyd Bitzer, one of the original thought-leaders in rhetorical situations, a rhetorical situation is defined as the following:

“A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.”

Lloyd Bitzer

Grant-Davie expands upon Bitzer’s definition by bringing a fresh perspective to the original definition.

In simple English, a rhetorical situation is the context that surrounds the communicator’s (rhetor’s) message. This discourse includes a speaker (rhetor), an audience, an issue (exigence), and a medium (speech, text, image, etc.).

The article by Sheffield provides some context on how to interpret visual rhetorical situations: analyze the audience, context, and purpose. We can also analyze arrangement, scale, text, color, and other design choices.

In the projects, we have the opportunity to write across various modes. Understanding how to analyze rhetorical situations will not only help us create better projects, but it will help us explain our projects in the rationales.

I’m taking this class for the informatics minor and advanced composition general education requirement. I’m excited to take this class and develop my writing skills across media. I’d like to consider myself a skilled writer, and I’m excited to see what else I learn in this class!

A little about me…

My name is Jacob Singleton, and I’m a senior studying economics and informatics.

After graduation, I hope to work at a consulting firm to combine business, design, and tech in a way that helps companies and consumers.

I started off at the University of Illinois without much direction. After joining Illinois Business Consulting freshman year, the nation’s largest student-run consulting firm, I realized consulting was a great way to help companies while continuing to express my creative side. Since then, I’ve been a consultant, senior consultant, and project manager, and I recently became the internal manager.

Around the same time, I joined The Daily Illini. I’m not quite sure why I joined, but I’m very glad I did. I started off as a designer, using software like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign to create graphics and laying out pages. I moved up to design editor then managing editor for online, so I’ve had lots of experience working with writers to tell their stories in a way where people want to read. This and the following video are two of my favorite “writing” things I’ve done (the latter of which the Society of Professional Journalists awarded best online news reporting in 2017 for region 5):