Visual Analysis

This in-class activity uses the popular HSBC ad campaign (a tryptich of the same image with different value labels) to introduce students to visual rhetoric and ideology. After discussing the ads, students create their own version.

This assignment pushes students to recognize the layers of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in something as visual and auditory as a flash game.

Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response.

Students practice closely describing and analyzing an image for its argument and rhetorical impact.

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past.  This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

Start close-reading on day one by using YouTube videos and considering their archives.

As a conclusion to an online research workshop, students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides.