Jones, Colleen. Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010. Print.

Clout is about usability, not of interface architecture, but of content. While the two work hand-in-glove, the real work for me, and most rhetoricians/content providers/writers is with content. I jumped into her book with great expectations. This was only magnified when I noticed the title of her fourth chapter, "Rhetoric: The Art of Influence."In it she promised to ground her argument upon the insights of our tradition, while linking them to complexities of new media production.

Sadly, Jones definition of rhetoric is a little thin. She begins, and ends, with Aristotle's ethos, logos, and pathos. For Jones, these become credibility, logic and emotion. All of which are explained in extremely superficial ways. In ten pages devoted to the subject, the expository text makes up less than two. Her approach is to define a term and give a lot of mostly visual (screen shots and images) examples of her term. While illustration is essential to good instruction, Jones doesn't develop her definitions, implications, or links to examples well enough. Here are two examples, occurring directly after one another on page 54, using her subheadings and the entirety of the associated text:

Apply Emotion to Content

Content offers many opportunities to charm your users' emotions.    (no examples) 

Voice

It's the personality or feel of your content. Two very different examples are Bliss and HowStuffWorks.com. Bliss is sassy, while HowStuffWorks is dissecting.  (two screenshots)

There obviously is far more thinking involved in making "emotional appeals,"and more too voice than adding a modifying adjective. Both of these issues are lacking in the same way, there is no conception of audience. Audience, or User, is at the root of good design. Whether it be interfaces or layout, navigation or text, a concept of the Audience/User is critical. And critically lacking in Clout.


On the upside, this is probably a good book for introducing rhetoric, at its most basic level, to the conversation among web designers. Her experience is good, and some of her examples work well when she is discussing her actual practices, far removed from discussing  "the art of influence."

Two sound rhetorical principles she introduces, but still too thinly, are the importance or repetition and looking for, or creating, the right moment. She defines the terms Chronos and Kairos  in terms of clock v. opportunity. I am fascinated by the idea of kairos a "pregnant moment," or "the fullness of time." The good communicator needs to know what time it is, and how that impacts his audience and message.