Overview:
Review three professionally created articles from the New York Times, and analyze each article based upon the questions below. The goal with this exercise is to think about what makes an article engaging to an audience beyond text, and why using multiple modes (e.g. multimodality) can be an effective rhetorical strategy to illustrate your purpose.
Questions
- How many modes does each article use to create meaning? (e.g. text, photos, videos, graphics, interactive features, etc.)
- How does each article’s presentation of the content impact its overall message? Or, put another way, what would be lost from the article if you removed one of the modes from it?
- Does each article achieve a balance between the different modes, not rely on one single mode above the rest? If so, how does the article do this?
- How does the article use video to engage the reader?
- How does the article use still photos to engage the reader?
- How does the article use graphics to engage the reader?
- How does the article use interactive features to engage the reader?