Quick Help: Organizing visuals and media in academic writing

• Use video and still images to capture your readers’ attention and interest in a vivid way, to emphasize a point you make in words, to present information that is difficult to convey in words, or to communicate with audiences with different language skills.

• Consider whether you want to use images alone to convey your message, or whether words are also needed to help readers understand.

• For presentations, consider what your audience should look at as they listen to you. Make sure that the visuals enhance rather than compete with what you say.

• If you are using visuals and words together, consider both the way each image or video works on its own and the way it works in combination with the words you use.

• If you are using visuals to illustrate a written-word text, place each visual as near as possible to the words 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 and document each visual appropriately.