Writing Assignments

Essay #4: Writing to Analyze

Wednesday, 12/5: Annotated Bibliography due in class
Friday, 12/7: Peer Review draft due in class

Friday, 12/14: Final Draft by midnight via e-mail (this is during finals week)

Components: 
Academic Essay: 1,600-2,000 words (85%)
Advertising Plan: 400-500 words (15%)
Annotated Bibliography: at least three entries (goes toward the Other Writing Assignments portion of your final grade)

Explanation: 
As we prepare for the second half of the course in the coming semester, which is centered on the idea that writing works as a force of persuasion, it makes sense for us to think about the most concentrated and direct form of persuasive language in our culture: advertising. The purpose of this fourth essay will be to explore and analyze a set of advertisements in order to determine the complex (and often surprisingly subtle) ways that these ads might affect the attitudes and ideas of their intended audience. The appeals that are used in ads are many, and they are not always logical; it is the task of this essay, therefore, to demonstrate a keen understanding of your chosen ads and inform your reader about specific persuasive aspects that she may not have noticed in the verbal and/or visual languages of those ads.

You can choose to analyze print ads, television ads, or internet ads – anything that you can cite, reproduce, or direct your reader to view for herself. You should look at more than one ad, though, so please choose a series of ads by the same company (like the Slimfast ads, for example) or two or more ads that advertise the same kind of product from different brands (like Gibson guitars and Fender guitars). You will then present a clear, detailed analysis that draws on strategies for analytical writing that can be found in Chapter 13 of our textbook. As we have seen during class, there are many different ways of looking for meaning in ads, including the layout, the images, the text, the body copy, the fonts, the logo, and so on. Your essay should also build upon what you learned about observing visual information in the previous paper.

You are welcome to choose ads from a product or service that is currently being marketed to someone in your own demographic. (In other words, please choose a product that is specifically relevant to you, and not something random, like a washing machine.) Also, another restriction is that you have to choose a product that is not related to anything that you’ve written about in the previous three papers. For example, if you wrote about tap dancing in the first essay, I am asking that you not write about swing dancing in this essay. If you already wrote about tennis, please don’t write about basketball. Hopefully, this essay will help us learn a little more about the many visual and verbal landscapes that are an unavoidable part of our lives.

In order to both present a more sophisticated analysis and add credibility and ethos to your essay, we will also be incorporating research into this paper: at least four research sources -- at least two from scholarly journals or books, and the rest of the sources can come from a popular magazine or newspaper. One of these sources can be something that we've read as a class, but you should find the other three on your own. You can look at books in our library about advertising or marketing, essays from academic journals in the databases, and also advertising trade magazines like Ad Age (which are not technically “scholarly,” but we’ll talk about that in class). All research should be cited in text and in a bibliography according to the current MLA style guidelines.

Major objectives of the essay:

-- To make critical observations about a series of ads, noticing how different aspects (images, text, layout, etc.) imply something meaningful to the audience. What are the persuasive strategies used by the ads in order to appeal to or influence the action of their consumers?

-- To use these observations in order to develop an analysis about the kinds of cultural values or ideologies that these ads are tapping into and/or exploiting. To do so, your will need to identify the target market for these ads. 

-- To use research in order to establish a basis in the essay for how to talk about ads: what other scholars look for in ads, what conclusions have already been made about how advertising works, etc. (This can be specifically related to advertisements for products/companies similar to yours, or it can simply look at more general principles in advertising.)

--- To present a very specific conclusion about how advertising (as a whole) appeals to cultural values or who it affects the way that we think about ourselves. This conclusion should be related to what you’ve said about your ads, but not simply a repetition of your key points. 

--- To write in a formal, academic tone that adheres to the strategies and guidelines established in our textbooks, and which we have been practicing in the first three essays.

Key points about research in the essay:

-- Your sources should be directly relevant to the points that you are trying to make (or need to make) about the ads that you’ve chosen.

-- Your research should be appropriate (such as distinguishing between scholarly and non-scholarly sources) and recent (published within the last 15 years, and dealing with contemporary issues).

-- Your research should be properly cited – both in the text of the essay and in the Works Cited list at the end.

Key points in the essay overall:

-- Ultimately it is your ideas that I’m interested in, so be sure that you balance your research sources with your own insight.

-- The essay should progress logically from topic to topic. This means good transitions between paragraphs, but also that the overall structure of the essay makes sense from beginning to end – that everything keeps adding up to your conclusion.

-- Avoid an obvious first sentence like “Advertising is all around us” or “It seems like wherever you look these days, you see an ad there.” Maybe your first sentence could reference something interesting or controversial that you’ll be writing about later on?

-- If you are dealing with negative stereotypes (sexist, racist, etc.), make sure that your essay is addressing the specific way in which these stereotypes are being used here, and what the stereotypes/bias in your ads specifically say about how our culture has tended to view and/or think about these groups. In other words, it’s not enough just to conclude that stereotypes are detrimental or offensive.

Advertising Plan: 

For this portion of the assignment, you will develop a short strategic plan that speaks directly to the advertisers of the product(s) that you've chosen. Imagine that you are a marketing director coming to this company with a new pitch. What are some of the flaws and/or shortcomings of their current ad campaign (i.e. the one that you've analyzed in the essay)? Here you get a chance to be evaluative and suggest how it might be altered to address some different values or attitudes of the target market. What are your thoughts on how they might do things differently in their ads? Can you come up with a new ad idea or new slogan that they might consider? What about your ideas are beneficial to them? (The tone of this portion of the project can be more informal than the essay above, but it should still be professional and maintain the usual standards of written English.)

Annotated Bibliography: 

An annotated bibliography is a record of your research, in which you briefly summarize the overall argument of the source and note any key points that are relevant to your own argument in the essay. For this project, please provide annotations for at least three of your four required sources. Each annotation should include the source's reference information in MLA style, as well as at least three sentences that describe the contents of the source. For more information, please see the Annotated Bibliographies page on the Purdue OWL.

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Project #3: Writing to Inform 

Monday, 11/12: Peer Review Draft due in class
Wednesday, 11/14: Final Draft due by midnight via e-mail

Components:
Academic Essay: 1,200-1,400 words (80%)
Reflective Essay: 300-400 words (20%)

Part 1: Academic Essay (80%)

If someone asks you about a movie that you’ve seen recently, the question is usually a variation on one of two different inquiries: “Was is any good?” or “What was it about?” The first question is one of evaluation, which asks you about the quality of the film in your opinion. The second question, however, is one of information, which can be presented without passing a judgment. In the same way that any social issue has many different aspects or any historical period is comprised of many different events, it is possible to isolate many elements of a film – beyond merely a play-by-play of the plot – in order to give your friend (or in this case, your reader) an overall sense of its themes.

It is possible to even offer a relatively unbiased interpretation about the movie – in other words, its “meaning” – that is based on what you were able to observe. Basically, what is it all about? Your thoughts on the film should spin out of and build on what you can identify as being there in the film itself: what you see, what you hear, and so on. 

  

The purpose of the main essay of this project will be to provide a comprehensive and informative overview of a single film: Let The Right One In (2008, directed by Tomas Alfredson). This includes the content of the film -- so yes, you’ll have to summarize the plot a little -- but also many other aspects of the film including its cinematography, setting, acting, characters, and conflict.

Because we can rely on our own observations to assess a situation, there will be more than enough in the film to discuss in your essay. But because there have been others who have written about this film in the past, it makes sense to think about the kinds of conclusions at which they’ve arrived. Or perhaps you would like to add to the context of your overall topic, in which case you might consider doing a little background research that will add depth to your own thoughts on the film. For this assignment, you will need to incorporate at least two research sources. These can include academic articles, as well as some reputable internet sources (which we will discuss in class), but will exclude Wikipedia and other fan-based writing about the film. We will also discuss proper MLA-style citations in class.

A careful examination of the writing prompt so far will reveal that the main essay is not asking for a movie review, however. A movie review is where you would say whether the film is good or bad – an evaluation of whether you actually liked it or not. One of the challenges of this academic essay will be to provide detailed information and logical conclusions while remaining as impartial as possible. This is an important skill to have, because in life you will often need to lay out the information about something in order that your readers/clients/patients/etc. can make an informed decision for themselves.

Part 2: Reflective Essay (20%)
As you may have noticed from both our textbook and our instructor's lectures and class discussions, there is a lot to say about writing. From strategies to rules to examples, much of what we've learned about writing so far has had a kind of trickle-down effect; the information precedes you -- the writer -- and it is therefore waiting for you to discover and apply to your own process. With this third project, though, we are going to spend time investigating our own decisions and thoughts in our writing itself. Thus, in addition to the main essay about Let The Right One In, you will also be turning in a short reflective essay in which you discuss some of the reasons why you made certain choices in the essay. This is your chance to tell me about the work that you put into this essay. Did you spend a lot of time on the introduction to really come up with something engaging? Did you think about some of the instructor's comments on the last essay and approach this new essay differently? Basically, try to develop a thoughtful and carefully-written response that addresses whatever factors influenced your composition and/or writing process for this essay in particular. In short: what kinds of things did you do in this essay, and why do you make those choices.

 

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Project #2: Observation

Wednesday, 10/10: Peer Review Draft due in class

Monday, 10/15: Final Draft due by midnight via e-mail

Components:
Essay of 1000-1400 words (65%)
Four tweets (15%)
A Craigslist ad (15%)
A photo  (5%)

Explanation of Project:
We can't not observe. All of the environments and objects that surround us speak to our many senses; our bodies are always processing information and adapting to stimuli whether we realize it or not. With this second project, therefore, we will try to foster an awareness of what we might otherwise take for granted by being conscious of our own observation. To do so, we will engage an object or a place in a number of different ways and across several media.

First, choose an object or place that you feel comfortable describing in detail. It might be best to choose something that you are already familiar with, but please note that we are focusing on the thing itself in this project, and not necessarily your relation to it. In other words, if you choose an object or place that is meaningful to you, it might be more difficult to disassociate yourself and your memories from the actual, physical thing.

Objects can include anything that you currently have access to. So for example: a chair, lamp, apple, bookbag, pencil, shirt, trashcan, action figure, doll, a microwave... basically anything that is a thing and is not alive. (Okay, maybe a houseplant or a tree would be okay, but definitely not an animal or person!)

Places can include anywhere that you are currently able to go and inhabit for a period of time, but is not too big of a space. So for example: your dorm, the library, a garden, a store, your house, a stadium, an art gallery... (But not, like, an entire city or state; that's just not manageable here. Even stadium might be pushing it in terms of size!)

Put simply, the premise of this project is to use your own powers of observation (including all of your senses) in order to describe, in detail, the many and minute aspects of that thing. This means getting really, really specific. This means looking and feeling and hearing and smelling (when applicable) for a long time, and making notes, and then translating those notes into coherent documents that will convey to the reader the deep down details of this object or place -- details that are available only through this process of observation.

Explanation of Components:
1) An essay of roughly 1000-1400 words, of which the objective is to convey the specific details of this object in an organized, formal tone. This essay will introduce the object or place, offer a description that develops in a logical form that allows individual points to build on one another, and concludes with a sense of the object/place on the whole. In other words, your conclusion should consider and seek to understand what all of these various "parts" add up to.

2) Four "tweets" of less than 140 characters each. Twitter is a social media site on which, if you want to say something, you have to do it concisely. People tweet about anything and everything, including the things that they see and the places that they go. Using this format, you will describe your object/place in four unique ways as though you were some kind of representative for that object or place. Tweets tend to be much more casual than "official" statements, so please take the form of the medium into consideration.

3) A Craigslist ad of roughly 300 words. Imagine that you are selling this object or place on Craigslist (which is a website for buying and selling items locally). What are the most desirable features that would entice someone to buy? How might you have to "dress up" something that someone might not want or need?

4) A photograph. Using a camera of some sort (digital, your phone, your friend's if you don't own one, etc.), take one picture of the object/place that you believe somehow captures its overall essence or aura. What detail or angle do you want to call attention to if you had to only show one detail or angle?

Any additional criteria by which these components should be evaluated will be addressed and developed during class discussion. All assignments will be submitted via to me via e-mail (which means, for example, that you don’t necessarily have to use Twitter to compose your tweets).

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Project #1: Writing from  Personal Experience

Wednesday, 9/19: Peer Review draft of Essay #1 due in class

Friday, 9/21: Final draft of Essay #1 due by midnight

Writing that is rooted in personal reflection can offer a unique perspective and an understanding of life to which readers may not otherwise have access. In many cases, the writer may also come to a new understanding of her life or her world as a result of the act of writing itself. Even if the story, setting, or subject is familiar to you, engaging the writing process can often yield subtle details about or insights into a situation – truths, in other words, that may not have been obvious at first. The end result of personal writing, though, is to use the narration of a unique experience as an occasion to express an idea or establish an emotional connection with your audience.

For this essay, you will be writing about your own lives, and through this translation of experience and memory into words, this essay should look to arrive at a conclusion that suggests new knowledge about you, or about the world around you. But by the end of this essay, your readers will also want to have learned or understood something that could be relevant to their lives, not just yours. With your reader in mind, you will need to consider the reason for reading this essay, in addition to your own reason for writing it.

To be clear, though, we are not looking for a “lesson” or “moral of the story,” but more of a reflection about what we might call the “meaning” of your experience, and the difference between how things were and how things are.

Based on our initial class discussions of the raw material available to us, it seems to me that there are two styles of personal essay from which we can choose for this paper: 

Some writers may choose to focus on a particular place or person, and through careful description will be able to relate the meaning of this place/person in your life. These essays will rely more heavily on detail and description in order to make your subject seem as complete, textured, and real as it is to you. 

Other writers may choose to recount a specific event or story from your life, and how something about this experience led you to a new insight about the world. These essays will rely more heavily on narration in order to add drama or suspense to the story, and while there will still be many interesting details, they will have to be carefully balanced with your storytelling. 

And some writers may have a little of both, depending on the topic of the reflection.

As I read these essays, I will be looking to see how you are engaging and maintaining the reader’s interest from the very beginning (which means strong introductions!), as well as how you are able to transition between points in the story; the paragraphs should be clearly organized in a way that guides the reader to your conclusion. The tone of this piece of writing can be more informal and somewhat closer to conversational than we typically expect of academic “essays” – which are, of course, only one genre of writing – but proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation will be expected by your audience. Other criteria for the evaluation of the essay will be addressed in and contributed by class discussion (and will be added here upon agreement).

Length: between 800 and 1,000 words