Elizabeth Royte

Elizabeth Royte takes advantage of the Medium platform to make a more effective essay in multiple ways. However one way that stood out to me most was her use of images and placement of the imagery. For example, the first image you see is a stairway through the woods with shadows of humans. This edited picture allowed readers to think more of the message that Royte is trying to get across. The meaning behind having these shadows in the picture is that there are many people in today’s society that are overlooked and not noticed because they are living in the shadows, very similarly to the people Royte talks about in her essay. Some of the other images used were strategically placed throughout to strengthen the points she was making. There were some images with statistics which further supported her points whereas some images were simply placed in spots to give a visual of what she actually found in the woods to show how real everything she talked about was. Not only do the pictures strengthen her argument, but they simply make the essay overall more welcoming and appealing to read. Oftentimes when an essay is entirely just composed of a whole lot of words, it can seem intimidating and push some readers away (maybe this is just a me thing, I’m not a huge reader so pictures make reading a little bit more enjoyable and make long writing pieces seem less scary).