Balancing summary with analysis for an image or a multimodal text
A-25
If you have written a summary of a text, you may find it useful to refer to the main points of the summary as you write your analysis. Your readers may or may not be familiar with the image or multimodal text you are analyzing and will need at least some summary to ground your analysis.
The following strategies will help you balance summary with analysis.
- Remember that readers are interested in your ideas about a text.
- Pose questions that lead to an interpretation or a judgment of a text rather than to a summary.
- Focus your analysis on the text’s message and main ideas or some prominent feature of the text.
- Pay attention to your topic sentences to make sure they signal analysis.
- Ask reviewers to give you feedback: Do you summarize too much and need to analyze more?
Student writer Ren Yoshida summarized the Equal Exchange advertisement by first describing part of the text, allowing readers to get their bearings, and then moving to an analytical statement about that particular part of the text.
