The feature photo above was taken by Estée Janssens on Unsplash.
In the context of academic papers, I thought of document design mostly as what Michael Klein and Kristi Shackelford focused on in their article “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in The Writing Classroom”: How someone goes about using the margins, spacing, font size and style, emphasis (bold or italic), and so on to elevate their papers. But they also touched on images, something I realized I fell short in.
I associate images in academic papers as mainly graphs and charts—and maybe the occasional poster—which is why I rarely ever add images to my papers. In a sense, it felt unprofessional to use any other kind of image. So, while I was reading “An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing” by Melanie Gagich, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she was implying there are other kinds of images that would be good to add to a paper. I wasn’t confident in when to apply that advice, either.
I took a break from thinking about it and instead started brainstorming on what medium to use for my remix essay by going through a list of my hobbies. While doing so, I remembered I enjoyed journaling. So, I decided to flip through my old journals to get a sense of whether it would be a good medium to use for the assignment—and it clicked. I should treat images in my essays like I do in my journals.
I decorate each journal entry with either doodles, pictures I tape on, and/or stickers. These decorations are almost always related to the entry, not only to illustrate or emphasize my points better, but also to make it easier for my future self to identify what an entry is about at first glance.
For example, below is a photo I took of a journal entry dedicated to the first play I ever went to. (The text was blurred for privacy.) In the entry, I taped on the ticket for the play and images that fit how I felt throughout the play: One of them depicts two characters and their cat jumping with excitement at the top because that’s how I felt coming into the theater, and another is a sticker of an exhausted bee closer to the bottom of the page to showcase how tired I was by the end of the play (it began at 7:30pm and ended at 10pm).
Of course, I can’t treat images in an essay exactly the same way I do in my journals. However, I can use the concept I’ve built through journaling of when it’s appropriate to add an image and what kind, and just tweak it to be more professional.
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