At a Glance: Organizing Visuals

Organizing Visuals

AT A GLANCE

  • Use images and visuals to capture your readers’ attention and interest in a vivid way, to emphasize a point you make in your text, to present information that is difficult to convey in words, or to communicate with audiences with different language skills.
  • Consider how the image works as an image and in combination with the text, and think about how readers are likely to respond to it.
  • Place each visual as near as possible to the text it illustrates.
  • Introduce each visual clearly: As the map to the right depicts….
  • Comment on the significance or effect of the visual: Figure 1 corroborates the firefighters’ statements….
  • Label each visual appropriately, and cite the source.