Any image or multimodal text can be read—that is, carefully approached and examined to understand what it says and how it communicates its purpose and reaches its audience. When you read a multimodal text, you are often reading more than words; you might also be reading a text’s design and composition and perhaps even its pace and volume.

Reading actively requires understanding the modes—words, images, and sound—separately and then analyzing how the modes work together.

When you read images or multimodal texts, it’s helpful to preview, annotate, and converse with the text—just as with words-only texts.

Multimodal texts, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) advertisement, combine words with an image to communicate a message.