When you present a topic with the help of visuals along with the text, it is called a pictorial essay. A pictorial essay consists of a short unstructured abstract, brief introduction, subheadings to organize the material and a summary. The number of references is very few, only limited to the main articles, the text is short as much of the message is delivered through figures and pictures. In a pictorial essay, there will be more pictures and less text.
How to write a pictorial essay?
The writing process of pictorial essay is as follows.
Understanding of the task
Before writing the pictorial essay, you need to understand the task that what you are required to write and present in the essay. Familiarize yourself with the criteria and think about the resources, how you can gather the text and pictures for your essay. For examples “maybe there is an upcoming event where you can take a lot of photos? If so, don’t miss your chance and arrange your work”.
The audience of the essay
Think who your audience will be? Who will be reading your essay? You need to choose the writing method according to the audience of the essay. Think whether your teachers, classmates or someone else will be the audience of your essay? Keep your essay simple so the information can reach to the audience easily. For example, if the audience of your essay are children, the information provided in your essay should be according to the interests of the children such as the pictures should be more colorful etc.
The purpose of the essay
the purpose of the essay should be defined before writing. All the elements used in the essay must serve this purpose. For example, if it’s aimed towards persuading your readers to take certain actions or to support a certain idea, you have to select your images carefully, making sure that they reflect your goal.
Pictures used in the essay
You should be very careful while using images for the essay. Take your time and select the best images for your essay that best describe your topic. Do not afraid to take too many images as you will require photos for describing your topic. But the images should be relevant to the text and the topic of the essay. You have to define your story and arrange photos in a certain way. Start with adding photos and write necessary descriptions for each image. Don’t start writing your essay from the text parts. Focus more on image than text. The written part of the essay must support and explain images. Thus, you have to write your descriptions and notes according to the message of each particular illustration. For example,if some image is funny, you have to point out what is funny about it, in the text. At the same time, make sure that the tone of your paper doesn’t change throughout the text. Just like any other essay type, this one implies writing a coherent and logically complete paper which is tied to the main topic and focused on the general idea.
The pictorial essays are somewhat difficult than the other essays as you have to present your ideas through pictures and you cannot provide a detailed explanation of the purpose.