Visual Analysis

Visual Analysis Order Description Visual Analysis This is another kind of analysis paper: From readings and class discussions, you know that the act of analysis involves breaking a text down into its component parts, and then assessing, first, how these elements work together, and, second, to what effect(s).  Ideally, such analysis helps you to understand how a particular effect has been achieved and will lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the author’s/creator’s purpose(s) in producing the work. The task: For this assignment, you will apply the basic skills of analysis to a visual text, writing a 4-5 page analysis of a visual text. Text selection: This text may be a magazine ad/cover, a photograph, or even a cereal box or other similar type of visual argument--but it must be current (i.e. no more than twenty years old) and it needs to be handed in with the final paper.  Since the choices are wide, you will be selecting and submitting your visual item as part of a mini-prospectus sometime soon. Key ingredients: Your paper should make an argument about how various parts of the text work together to achieve the effect(s) you see, and should offer support for that argument based on analytical interpretation of certain elements of the text.  In your paper, be sure that: --your analysis includes necessary (but brief) description (I need to understand what you see in your own terms); --you include the key elements of the rhetorical situation (yes, even an image has a rhetorical situation); --you provide a thesis statement that makes an interpretive claim about how the component parts work together to achieve some effect(s), and about why the text’s creator might, given the rhetorical situation you have identified, have made these particular choices; and --your paper looks not only at explicit arguments made by your image but also implicit arguments, where applicable To support your thesis, you should provide examples of these choices, thoroughly explaining their significance.  Consider the appeals the visual text is trying to make.  How do these appeals help you describe/analyze what is going on? Here are several steps that will prepare you to write the paper: 1.  Examine the text closely. Consider its context/rhetorical situation, including such things as its medium and target audience. (This will help you to imagine the situation out of which the text was created, and what purposes its creator may have had in mind. Think about the different components of rhetorical situation that are particularly important for your text—think back to the rhetorical situation handouts we have used in this class.) 2.  Break the text down into its various component parts: color and/or color-scheme (or lack thereof); patterns; scale and presentation of images; written text or captions; design elements such as font size and style; the relationship of images to word(s); etc.  Make notes based on your observations of these parts of the visual text.  Be sure to consult the various handouts/checklists that we have been using in class. 3.  Having considered these parts, examine the way they have been “assembled.” How do they relate to and affect one another in the total composition?  What does analyzing the smaller elements of the text reveal about its message(s)?  In what ways is that message implicitly conveyed?  (Note: Examining the implicit is crucial to this paper.  A thesis statement such as “This ad tries to convince the viewer to buy Nikes” is not performing a substantive reading of the less direct messages of a Nike ad.)