English 30-1 · Visual texts
Reading images as arguments
Photographs, cartoons and advertisements appear on the diploma as texts, and they are analyzed the same way as prose: identify the choices, then explain what those choices do to the viewer.
Composition
The idea: someone decided where you would look first, and how big everything would be. Those decisions are the text.
| Choice | Usual effect |
|---|---|
| Focal point | Where the eye lands first, set up by contrast, light, or converging lines |
| Scale and placement | A small figure in a large frame reads as vulnerable or insignificant |
| Low angle (looking up) | Power, dominance, threat |
| High angle (looking down) | Weakness, exposure, sympathy |
| Close-up | Intimacy; the viewer cannot look away |
| Framing | What is cut out matters as much as what is left in |
| Lighting | Warm and bright reads as safety; harsh shadow reads as threat or isolation |
| Colour | Saturated and warm energizes; desaturated grey flattens into bleakness |
| Focus | A blurred background removes competition and isolates the subject |
| Caption or text | Anchors the meaning; the same image reads differently under a different caption |
Worked: describing a choice properly
Weak: The photo has a person standing in the snow, which is sad.
Strong: The figure is placed at the bottom edge of the frame with the rest given over to empty sky, so scale alone makes them look insignificant before the viewer has read the caption.
Name the choice, then the effect. That is the entire difference.
The appeals
The idea: persuasion works on feeling, reasoning, or trust in the speaker. Most texts use all three, and questions ask which one is doing the heavy lifting.
| Appeal | Works on | Looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Pathos | Emotion | A child's face; a story about one family rather than a statistic |
| Logos | Reason | Data, causes and consequences, a worked argument |
| Ethos | Trust in the source | A doctor in a white coat; a speaker naming their experience |
- Loaded language reports and judges at once: a scheme rather than a plan, swamped rather than increased.
- Bias shows in what is left out as much as in what is said.
- Acknowledging the counterargument builds ethos — provided the text then answers it.
- Borrowed authority is the commonest trick in advertising: the coat, the uniform, the laboratory, none of which is evidence.
Cartoons and advertisements
The idea: both compress an argument into one frame, so every element in the frame is carrying meaning.
An editorial cartoon
- Identify the elements: who or what is drawn, and how they are exaggerated.
- Decode the symbols: a tightrope for risk, a ship for a country, a clock for urgency.
- Read the caption, which usually supplies the turn.
- State the claim: the cartoon is arguing something. Say what, in a sentence.
An advertisement
- What is being sold — and what is being promised, which is rarely the same thing.
- Who it imagines buying: the people shown, the setting, the language.
- Which appeal carries it, and what evidence, if any, sits behind the appeal.
- What the composition hides: price, consequences, the rest of the story.
Working a visual question
The idea: describe, then interpret, then justify — in that order, and never skip to the interpretation.
- What do I see? Subject, setting, colour, angle, framing, text.
- Where does my eye go, and what put it there?
- What is the effect on me as a viewer?
- Which choice produced that effect? That pairing is the answer to almost every visual question.
- If two visuals are given, find one decision where they differ and build the comparison on it.
Watch out: an option that only describes what is in the frame is not an analysis, however accurate it is. The right answer connects a choice to an effect.