In many of your college classes, you’ll have the opportunity to read and write about images, such as photographs or paintings, as well as multimodal texts, such as advertisements, maps, videos, or Web sites. Multimodal texts are those that combine one or more of the following modes: words, static images, moving images, and sound. You might, for instance, be asked to analyze an advertisement for a composition course, a map for a geology course, or a YouTube video for a sociology course.

Writing about images or multimodal texts differs from writing about written texts—a photograph is a different kind of text from a poem, of course—but there are also similarities. All texts can be approached in a critical way. You can engage with them by studying how they work to communicate their message and by discovering within them something that is surprising, interesting, and worthy of interpretation. To analyze an image or a multimodal text, first you need to read it carefully and critically.