Week 2 blog "Why Is Genre Important in Multimodal Projects?”

 

In the article Visualizing Mental Illness, the author makes use of visual and textual elements to fit the rhetorical situation by making the hidden effects of anxiety disorders, and also Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), easier to access and more meaningful to people without mental health issues. The goal is to increase awareness, understanding, and empathy in both elected officials and the public when it comes to mental health problems. The genre here is an informative or persuasive essay, aiming to inform on personal experiences and research findings in a more effective fashion. The author uses data visualization in the form of a color-coded drawing with text used as a way to explain the complicated experiences of anxiety in a more understandable way. This enables readers to make a human connection with the data. The visual elements include drawings representing the number of checking incidences, the repetitive pattern of the checks, and the return to re-check things. The essay uses imagery in the form of data visualizations to explain the effects of OCD on the author's everyday life. These visualizations I feel are basically metaphorical representations of the internal struggles, compulsions, and difficulties faced by individuals with OCD, making the unseen struggles of mental illness more real and relatable to the audience. This can help build empathy and reduce false beliefs surrounding mental health. I feel that this is a relatively effective tool in communicating the experiences of anxiety disorders and advocating for increased support and understanding. I felt drawn to this as a psychology major because we often use drawings with example data from a person in research to communicate our findings and using different colors and showing how each points relates the visual representation to the data.