"In this wide-ranging analysis, Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett demonstrate how visual language in professional communication - text design, data displays, illustrations - is shaped by conventional practices that are invented, codified, and modified by users in visual discourse communities. Drawing on rhetorical theory, design studies, and a broad array of historical and contemporary examples, Shaping Information: The Rhetoric of Visual Conventions explores the processes by which conventions evolve and proliferate and shows how conventions serve as the medium that designers use to shape, stabilize, and streamline visual information. Additionally, the volume defines the rhetorical nature of conventional practices, seeks to dissolve the tension between convention and invention, and explores the situational variables of specific interactions that can complicate how users deploy and interpret conventions."--Jacket.