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Justification Paper

Audience: This audience for this graphic consists of 10 th-grade students in literature classes that I teach. The audience consists of eight

special education students, 18 remedial students, 20 regular education students and 25 college preparatory students. This group

includes a wide range reading and writing abilities. There are also several students who speak English as a second language, but these

students all perform as well as the average students in the class or better.

Why: I’m continuing with A Long Way Gone as my subject because it is the thing we’re working on in my classes and I like teaching it

because the kids actually enjoy this part of the class more than the others. I really focus on cause and effect in the changes of Ishmael’s

personality throughout the memoir and I also use this text as a jumping off point for talking about subjects that many of the students are

less familiar with like war and what Africa is really like. This graphic breaks out the book into those pieces to prepare the students to be

ready to pay attention to the elements that we will focus on during the reading and the essay test at the end of the unit. This graphic

uses contiguity because the headshot of the author look right into the image. Also, the image of the continent looks, to my eyes at least,

to be pointing to the left, so the placement on the right directs the eyes to the other parts of the image. Similarity is used as well. Each

cluster of information uses the same font and structure of heading, colon, and information. The color of the graphic title and the color

used for both the filled in Sierra Leone on the map and its label are pulled directly from the graphic’s dominant image of the book cover.

Proximity is used to cluster the topics. Each text block is far enough from other text blocks to avoid confusion and the two images used

to illustrate the text blocks are placed in a way that it makes the connection obvious. (Lohr, 2008)
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References

Beah, Ishmael (2007). A Long Way Gone. New York: Sarah Crichton Books.

Lohr, Linda L. (2008). Creating Graphics for Learning and Performance: Lessons in Visual Literacy (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, New

Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.