Guidelines for actively reading an image or a multimodal text

• First impressions. What
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  strikes you right away? What is the overall effect of the text?
• Composer. Who composed the text? What are the composer’s credentials?
• Genre. What kind of text is it: An advertisement? A photograph? A video? A podcast?
• Purpose. What is the text’s purpose: To persuade? To inform? To entertain? If the text is an advertisement, what product or idea is it selling?
• Audience. Who is the target audience? What assumptions are made about the audience?
• Context. Where was the text originally published or viewed?
• Design. What seems most prominent in the text’s design?

• Design elements. What design features do you notice? How do various design elements—colors, shapes, words, images, sound—help convey the text’s meaning and serve its purpose? What are the relationships among the parts? Focus on one design element at a time to help you understand its role in the text and your response to it.
• Audience. What clues suggest the text’s targeted audience? What assumptions does the text make about its audience? What is the audience being asked to do, feel, question, or believe?
• Thesis or message. What is the text’s thesis, central idea, or message? How do the design elements work together to reveal and illustrate this idea or message?

• What are the strengths of the text?
• What are the limitations of the text? What is puzzling or incomplete about the text’s treatment of the subject matter?
• Does the text raise questions that it does not resolve?
• What
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  assumptions does the text make about its audience? Are these assumptions valid?
• How does the design of the image or multimodal text shape your reaction to it?

Guidelines for writing a summary of an image or a multimodal text

• In
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  the first two sentences, mention the title of the text and the name of the composer (or the sponsoring organization or company if you cannot identify a composer), and provide some brief information about the context—when, why, and for whom the text was composed and where it appeared.
• State the text’s central idea or message.
• Maintain a neutral tone; be objective.
• As you present the text’s ideas, use the third-person point of view and the present tense: The focus of the Zipcar advertisement is. . . . Devaney’s slide presentation argues. . . .
• Keep your focus on the text. Don’t state the text’s or composer’s ideas as if they were your own.
• Put your summary in your own words; if you borrow a phrase or a sentence from the text, put it in quotation marks and cite the text.
• Limit yourself to presenting the text’s key points.

Guidelines for analyzing an image or a multimodal text

• What
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  is your first impression of the text? What details in the text create this response?
• When and why was the text created? Where did the text appear?
• What clues suggest the text’s intended audience? What assumptions are being made about the audience?
• What is the thesis, central idea, or message of the text? Do you find it persuasive?
• Does this text tell a story? How would you sum up the story?
• If the text is multimodal, what modes are used, and why? How do the modes work together?
• How does the arrangement of sounds or design details—images, illustrations, colors, fonts, perspective—help convey the text’s meaning or serve its purpose?