En bild säger mer än klara ord : En undersökning av visuella och narrativa komponenter i myndighetstext

Sammanfattning: According to law all Swedish authorities must express themselves using correct, plain and comprehensible language whenever they communicate with the citizens in order to make it easy to understand what needs to be known to participate in the Swedish democratic society. I would like to explore if there are more tools than the language that could be used to make their communication easier to comprehend, in this case images and stories. In this essay I will investigate the relationship between the written words and the visual components – images and illustrations – in brochures from Swedish authorities. I will also try to identify possible narratives in the brochures, and examine the functions of these narratives. To do this study I use a semiotic analysis including denotation and connotation and narrative analysis according to Burke and Greimas. The result showed that most of the images are used to anchor, confirm, the written text while some seek to guide our interpretations of the text or to add a new dimension to it. Only one of my three analyzed brochures contains a clear example of a narrative, while the others contain narrative element. My most important finding is that the narratives are mostly hidden within the images and therefore get dual functions– both as anchors of the text and as a narrative