Analyze 
Use the basic features.

Appropriate Explanatory Strategies: Using Visuals

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Patricia Lyu, like Toufexis, uses a flowchart to show the stages of a process she is describing in her essay. In Lyu’s case, the visual comes from one of her sources. In contrast, Toufexis’s visual was most likely created after her article was written, by the magazine’s art editor, Nigel Holmes. Notice also that whereas Lyu, following a convention of academic writing, refers in the text of her essay to her visuals, labels them “Fig. 1” and “Fig. 2,” and includes captions, Toufexis does not refer to the visual in her text, and the visual does not have a caption.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing Toufexis’s use of the visual in Love: The Right Chemistry:

  1. Analyze the visual included in Toufexis’s Time magazine article. Consider it apart from the rest of the article. What can you learn from the visual itself? What makes it easy or hard to read?
  2. Skim Toufexis’s essay to mark where she discusses each of the stages in the process described in the flowchart. Considering her original audience, how well does the flowchart work as a map to help readers navigate through the somewhat technical content of her explanation? Would it have been helpful had Toufexis referred to and labeled the visual?

    Question

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