Evaluating Messages and Images

EVALUATING MESSAGES

*The importance of evaluating the effectiveness of our messages is by developing

and using strategic questions to identify strengths and weaknesses

FOUR MAIN QUALITIES FOR AN EFFECTIVE MESSAGE

1. Simplicity
2. Specificity
3. Structure
4. Stickiness

STRATEGIES FOR EVALUATING A MESSAGE

– In order to evaluate whether a message is effective, we can ask ourselves a series of

questions which reflect a messages simplicity, specificity, structure and stickiness.

1. SIMPLICITY
* In order to ensure that our messages have simplicity, we should
ask ourselves two questions:
– is my purpose evident?
– Is my core message clear?

2. SPECIFICITY
*Refers to our choices of language and its usage on order to ensure
language is specific we may ask ourselves:
– Is my language specific?
– is my language concrete, rather than abstract?
– am i suing words which have additional meanings and could perhaps be misconstrued?

3. STRUCTURE
*Ideas should be organized and easy to follow.
– Does my messages have a STRUCTURE?
– is there a more effective way to arrange my ideas?
4. STICKINESS

EVALUATING IMAGES

* It is important to critically evaluate images you use for research, study and presentation
images should be evaluated like any other source, such as journal articles or books, to
determine their quality, reliability and appropriateness. Visual analysis is an important step in
evaluating an image and understanding its meaning and also. there are three steps of
evaluating an image and these are:

1. Identifying Source
2. Interpret contextual information
3. Understand implications

CONTENT ANALYSIS

1. What do you see?

2. What is the image all about?
3. Are their people in the image?
4. What are they doing?
5. How are they presented?
6. Can the image be looked at different ways?
7. How effective is the image as a visual message?

VISUAL ANALYSIS

1. How is the image composed?

2. What is in the Background and what is in the foreground?
3. What are the most important visual?

IMAGE SOURCE

1. Where did you find the image?

2. What information does the source provide about the origins of the image?
3. Is the source reliable and trustworthy?
4. Was the image found in an image database or was it being use in another context to convey
meaning?
TECHNICAL QUALITY

1. Is the image large enough to suit your purposes?

2. Are the color, light and balance, true?
3. Is the image a quality digital image without pixilation or distortion?
4. Is the image in a file format you can use?

CONTEXTUAL INFO

1. What information accompanies the image?

2. Does the text change how you see the image? How?
3. Is the textual information intended to be factual to inform or is intended just to influence what
and how you see?
4. What kind of context does the information provide?
5. Does it answer the questions where, how, and why?