Image Analysis

In reading all of this literature about incorporating technology into English classrooms, it is becoming more and more evident that there are numerous possibilities. Simple enhancements of photos, fonts, captivating language, all help lure audiences in very specific ways toward specific rhetorical goals. Anne Francis Wysocki explains this concept in her article “The Sticky Embrace of Beauty.” Drawing upon her perception of an article encountered in the New York Times as a reference in demonstrating her argument, Wysocki captured me as a reader due impart to the shock of seeing a naked woman featured in the advertisement. The article provides helpful information about the history of analysis of images in ads while also giving tools to move beyond the often constricted scope of tapered perceptions associated with advertisements. The activities Wysocki offers as the remedy to this problem are useful in taking students away from their narrow perceptions by requiring them to interrogate the images in order to open and extend the conversations about them.

She offers tools for a deeper analysis of images which serves the rhetorical goal of getting students to write but overlooks the attached goal of incorporating technology. A thorough analysis of images does not necessarily lead to technological incorporation, although there are many ways which it could. The activities that Wysocki provided at the end of the chapter could easily include components requiring students to find images using computers, create online discussions topics about their projects, use digitized text, and any other technology relevant creativity which students may design.