Visual and Verbal Texts

Balance: Symmetry

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

--John F. Kennedy

A scale with equal weights on both sides.

Balance

Houses, Atlanta. Photo by Walker Evans, 1936.

Assymetrical Balance

Chicago. Photo by Yasuhira Ishimoto, 1951-52.

Comparison and Contrast

At the Time of the Louisville Flood,

Margaret Bourke-White, 1937

Description: “A Picture is worth a Thousand Words”

General Store, Moundville, Alabama, by Walker Evans, 1936

Emphasis

Some of the ways writers create emphasis:• Headings• Boxes• Typesizes• Boldface and italic• Sentence structure• Placement: beginning or end of book,

chapter, paragraph, etc.

Emphasis

Afghan Girl, (a refugee), 1985, by Steve McCurry

Metaphor

Narration

Street scene following the bombing of Mannheim,

Germany, World War II

Pattern

We recognize certain kinds of writing by the patterns they follow. This is also called genre or generic conventions. For example, we depend on certain patterns to read a newspaper:

• the comics

• classified ads

• stock market report, etc.

Pattern

It is not just an optical pattern, it is also one way to see the world – simultaneously as parts and a whole.

Point of View

Afghanistan, photo by James Nachtwey, 1996

Proportion

Used primarily in design. In writing, when we pick up an old book and find a paragraph that runs for several pages, our modern sense of proportion tells us the paragraph is too long.

Proportion

Paris, photo by Frank Horvat, 1974

Unity

Hot Shot Eastbound, or the Laeger Drive-in, photo by O. Winston Link, 1955

Acknowledgement

This powerpoint is based on the textbook:

Picturing Texts, ed. Faigley, Lester, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe.

New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.

So the point is…

We use much of the same terminology in talking about visual and verbal texts.

These are some terms you can use to analyze pictures.

Goodbye!