The Best Damn Introduction...EVER!

The goal of our writing exercise today is to be engaged to our own writing:

Do you take your words to be your lawfully written thoughts? Do you promise to work detail, thesis, and thought-provoking questions into your writing? Do you promised to make claims about who your ad is for, and how the ad attempts to sucker you in? Will you discuss specific language (copy, headlines) and images in the ad that try to appeal to the audience in a certain way? Will you explain what that way is? For better or worse? ...

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Writing Strategy: Conciseness --> Getting to the point fast, so that one can actually spend time developing the point and any questions that an engaged audience will naturally have.

• Avoid sweeping (overly obvious) statements: "Since the beginning of time...." "Music means so much to so many" "Analyzing advertisements allows us to understand a culture." "Ads appeal to emotions" (These kinds of statements slow down our reading, take too long to get to topic, and really make the reader think, "Duh!.")

• Show AND Tell: Give physical description (specific detail) of your subject and what you infer from that physical description, and try to both in one sentence, or in back-to-back sentences. (Example: The US government is trying to persuade younger Americans to do the census by using a rap song with the lines "We can't move forward / until you send it back."

• Be Active: Don't say what you are going to do, just start writing on subject. From sentence one, you don't need to explain that you are analyzing (or summarizing, or arguing). You just need to start your analysis from the first word of your essay!

• Start off first line of essay with an engaging, creative lead in. Here are some ways to "hook" your audience by turning the ads back on themselves (in writing):

1. Description of specific images in ad that you see as key elements that provide you your analytical meaning, and what exactly is that implied meaning out of image. OR
2. Restate key phrases (tag line, copy, stat) from ad that you infer meaning from, and what is the meaning those lines have to you. (Example: Just Do It. One on of the simplest phrases in advertising, the appeal of "Just Do It" is that Nike has challenged its consumer to stop finding excuses why one is not Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Roger Federer. Nike's main appeal is say, wear what the best athletes wear and don't worry about having talent; worry about working hard. OR
3. Pose a question about the emotional appeal of your specific ad, BUT pose the question as if you were asking the creators of the ad about specific parts of the ad. (Example: "Dear Fruit of the Loom CEOs, do you really think Charlie Sheen has enough celebrity to sell underwear?"), OR
4. Start off essay by introducing the specific American audience (the more specific, the better) and what emotional appeal is being used on them, and/or what are some assumptions ad seems to say about its audience. (Example: "According to Old Spice advertisements in 2010, the American male should still be ashamed of himself if his body is anything less than a finely-sculpted Renaissance statue, if he allows himself to smell of anything flowery, and if he allows himself to really listen or care what his woman thinks!). OR
5. The Laundry List of key elements: images, text, image and text. Through question or statement, a concise list of the things you will address further in essay can really get audiences attention. (Example: What do talking babies, golf, Lindsay Lohan, and trading stock all have in common?)
6. Identify what the advertisement is playing off of: specific stereotypes, a specific cultural phenomenon or trend, a specific event? In other words, what does the commercial remind you of? Make a personal declaration that connects ad to the larger world from which ad borrows. (Example: Apple computers, in 1984, used the main theme of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 in a Super Bowl commercial to show their product as a way to break free from the handcuffs of society.)