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.)

Critical Writing Practices / Strategies

Writing Exercise: Some Basic Topic Sentences for Analyzing Advertisement (use book examples):

• Make a claim about how an image in your advertisement uses a specific emotional appeal.

• Make a claim about how the slogan/headline makes an emotional appeal. (How does the slogan connect to the emotional appeal? Explain yourself!)

• Make a claim about how the arrangement/placement of objects (words and images) in the advertisement support the emotional appeal you’ve claimed the ad is using…

• Make a claim about why the emotional appeal and specific content in the ad (things you’ve already discussed, perhaps) imply that the ad is geared to a specific audience – and, yes, identify within your claim who that specific audience is.

• Make a claim, reflecting again on the emotional appeal and target audience, about what the ad implies people value. To be even clearer in your claim also mention the product being sold!

***Your answers for each of the above can be what you use to guide your reader through your essay. Logically, if these become your topic sentences you can re-order them according to how you see them clarifying your larger thesis statement. (Each becomes a section of your larger essay, and you can transition between each topic with "hinge sentences"!)

• And you can also make sub-topic sentences for paragraphs that fall under each topic – this is how you can develop your essay. Use paragraphs to get as much in on the topic as necessary

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Writing Exercise 2: Seeing the bigger picture / Going global

• What cultural messages may be implied within the advertisement?

• What part/characteristic in ad is implying those messages?

• To answer, clarify “Who is being targeted in the ad?” and how you see this being the target audience. What does this say about what advertisers think this audience values?

• These, again, are simply questions that, if you ask yourself and then answer, can help you develop each section of your analysis (each topic that relates to your thesis statement)

Example: Look at the Chris Brown “Got Milk?” ad as an example. Why not use a lawyer? Why not a doctor? Why not a poet? Why not an accountant? … What does it say that musicians, actors and athletes are the ones whose status is often used to sell a product? (Discussing the possible reasons allows you to insert into your analysis what in our American society are the popular examples of achievement, according to such media. You can further discuss what these media think specific audiences want to achieve – and what these assumptions simply about cultural values / beliefs)

Continuing to be Funny

You will also want to make sure to cite the commercial (as it is a primary source). To do so, go to the Diana Hacker MLA Work Cited website, and follow the examples shown for your particular on-line website (since this commercial is on YouTube).

Writing Sins & The Complexity of Humor

Quality writing draws a reader in to the images and ideas presented, creates a unique world for the reader to live in, and has what Ernest Hemingway calls "vigorous language."

We must pay attention to the finer details, so that when we come to the page our ideas are most accurately and individually portrayed.

Writing Sins

Judgmental Words: you do want to provide your audience with what you think, but don't tell them how to feel about a subject. Have confidence that your audience will see the "bad" in a person who, for instance, thinks it is funny to go around kicking random people in the back of the knee!

• Example Bad words: bad, good, great, amazing, rude, mean, dumb, super, wonderful, sloppy, intimidating, cool...

• Exceptions: of course, writing would be hard if we weren't allowed to use these words at all, but the goal is to rely more on the describing what about subject gives you the feeling.

• To Combat: focus on details from text that provide you the feeling. Provide the detail, and then expand on WHY that particular detail is important, as you understand. How do you see that detail operating in the text?

General Store Language: an over-reliance on abstract adjectives, adverbs, nouns and verbs that have innumerable meaning. There is nothing more boring than reading an essay that is filled with flat, voiceless, faceless characters and unknown, under-painted landscapes. There is nothing more frustrating than when an author replies on the common associations and assumptions that go with a concept like "freedom" or "love," and won't provide their own subject-cultures definitions of these concepts. (As Foreigner sings, "I want to know what love is, I want you to show me.")

• Example Abstractions: love, freedom (!), happy, people, animals, thing, everything, everyone, no one, nothing ...

• To Combat: As I said, defining generic terms is one thing. Another combat move would be to, in the revision process, seek out weaker phrases from sentence to sentence. When you see yourself using all-inclusive language like "everyone, no one, everything, people, etc." you need to stop and rewrite that phrase to the specific person or to be less all-inclusive. (I know you don't really mean "They love everyone" so why would you use this weak phrase?)

Pronoun High: we, us, they, them, he, she, it, this, that. Uggggggggggggh. Really? From the first two sins, the reasons these words are worth avoiding should be obvious. The constant use of pronouns to replace the noun is easy to do for any writer, but easy does not mean that using pronouns makes for the best writing.

Using pronouns can cause you to miss opportunities in your writing to re-define/develop your subject more thoroughly. Yes, constantly referring to your subject as "The Outsider Graffiti Gang" might get tedious, or tiresome. However, instead of using a generic pronoun like "They," use a noun-phrase that helps build their character of that noun. For instance, you might replace "The Outsider Graffiti Gang" with "The lawbreakers..." or "The subversive artists...." What are some other ways you can describe your subject that can replace pronouns? Try using the phrases when appropriate...

It, this, that are three words used at the beginning of sentences that are highly frustrating. Avoid these words if you can! Again, you can build sentence-to-sentence coherence by using the specific reference instead of the vague pronoun "this" is replacing. One thing that

Writing Activity (to be handed in!)

• With the three writing sins fresh in your brain, go through your essay and find examples of where you committed one or more sins.

• Re-write at least two of your sinful sentences, trying to eradicate the weakness of the former language. Include in your re-write the sentence (or two) that come prior, so that we can see how you worked out your sentence for better clarity and cohesion.

What is humor?

Analysis includes the use of specific ideology (often found in guiding principles used) to better understand the complex construction of a text, and to better articulate our view of that text.

Analyzing humor, for example, allows us to better understand our humanity! At least, we hope that it does. Furthermore, analyzing one's humor is a great topic because humor is a great example of how individual our ideologies may seem on the surface while united underneath.

Huh? Well, let's look at three large theories of humor, as described on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Superiority:

• Thomas Hobbes’ “Superiority Theory” à “The passion of laughter is nothing else than sudden glory arising from some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.”

• Eminency – having a higher status (for some reason)
• Infirmity – lack of strength, character flaw

Incongruity

• “Arthur Schopenhauer agreed in 1844, when he explained in The World as Will and Idea that laughter is a way of acknowledging an incongruity between the conceptions that listeners or viewers hold in their minds and what happens to upset their expectations.”

Relief: see definition on IEP link

- Okay, now we can watch and discuss these commercials, and practice analysis of humor...

Writer to Writer

Guiding Principle: it doesn't matter if you find the 'guiding principle" first, or have your song. Either way, you need a guiding principle to help you express your own thoughts about the relevance of the text you are writing on.

The 'guiding principle' is a global theory/concept/idea from a professional authority that you use to focus your own audience on how to look at your local subject.

The 'guiding principle' is the match that lights your candle. The 'guiding principle' allows you to see your subject out of the shadows. The 'guiding principle' allows you to give form to your own ideas.

For example, pretend that famous lit critic Harold Bloom said that most literature of the 1950s was anti-feminst and showed that Americans valued women only as homemakers. I could apply his idea to reading a novel from that time period. I could write an essay analyzing whether it proved or disproved Harold Bloom's theory. Bloom's theory guides me to discuss the novel in terms of its feminist or anti-feminist themes!

Find A Guiding Principle

For your own essays (and whenever you are asked to analyze a subject), you will want to find a guiding principle that helps you express larger ideas about the text.

In regards to Response 3, you will want to use a "guiding principle" that relates to the subject of the song, and perhaps one that theorizes on music itself.

To find:

1) Where to look? Search for articles on your local/ library database.

2) What to look for? Look for texts that do exactly what you are supposed to do in your own assignments. In our case, you are analyzing music for social relevance. So, look for an article/text that is analyzes music and society.

• search "music" and "society" and different forms of this word. I searched for "music theory" and "culture" on Columbia C's library on-line catalog.

• You might also enter in search terms that deal more directly with your song's subject (love, teenagers, abuse, infidelity (cheating), ethnicity (Mexican, Latin, African, European, Caucasian), type of music (hip hop, pop, disco, techno, rock, etc.).

• When you attempt to find an article that will help inspire your own writing, you want to give yourself as many search terms as you can. You never know what kind of cool texts are out there, written by professionals in the academic disciplines -- like you, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and even chemists love music, and often someone in their field has written an article on music and its relation within their field.

Writing Activity: Questions & Considerations To Answer In Your Analysis

You are going to spend time, in silence, writing out answers to the questions provided on the guidelines handout for Response 3. Only, I want you to consider two more things as you are writing out your answers:

1) Point of view / tone the singer takes --> good writing takes into account and incorporates not only what is being said, but HOW what is being said is to be taken. Work on adding this into your analysis. (There is a difference between "I", "we" and "they." What are the implications of the point of view taken? Is the writer including her/himself, or are they speaking out against someone?)

2) Pay attention to your own verbs and modifiers! Work on being creative with your verbs by experimenting with tonally-appropriate verbs in your discussion of the songs.

• Instead of using bland verbs like "sings" and "raps" try to use verbs with emotional/intellectual layers --> "mourns," "meditates," "screams," "exults," "rattles," etc. Nail down your analysis by nailing down the tone with the use of verbs that emphasize the way a song is sung!

• The same goes for using adjectives and adverbs in discussing lyrics. Are notes stretched out or sped up. Reflect upon how a line is sung and how that adds to the meaning of the lyrics!

Response 3: Lyrical Analysis

Due: Thursday, Feb. 25, 2010, ready to hand in at the beginning of class

Worth: 5 pts = 5% of final grade

Guidelines:

- Three well-developed paragraph, double-spaced

- 12 pt. font; Times New Roman font.

- Title that creatively informs us about which song and theme are analyzed

- MLA Citation used (page #) at end of ALL cited material. Plus a Work Cited page.

Prompt:

The main purpose of this essay is to make one analytical claim on the social relevance of a song, specifically the lyrics. The term ‘social relevance’ is used here to mean that the lyrics are impactful to a larger audience – an audience you will define.

Some general ways a song may be socially relevant include: the lyrics make a political statement, cultural awareness /identity, the expression of a common human experience. Your job in writing the analysis is to explore how a song makes an impact on an audience – what do the songs lyrics say on a subject, and how is their argument that listeners will “buy.”

For example, Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane” was socially relevant because the lyrics told the story of a black man wrongfully accused and jailed for a murder he didn’t commit – it was a song outraged by racism and wanted people to meditate on the injustice. If this were my focus of analysis, I would spend the entirety of the essay discussing how the lyrics enlighten its listeners on the events of the night and how the injustice comes out of the plot.

The structure of your essay: one intro paragraph with a guiding principle, one body paragraph that develops one analytical point about the lyrics, and one conclusion paragraph that brings back the guiding principle and main point in body.

Critical Thinking Points

- What is the subject of the song?

- In what way does the song take a different approach on the subject?

- Does the song tell a specific story (like “Hurricane”), a general story that could be anybody, or does it speak for a specific group of people (like “God Bless the USA”)?

- What is the song’s major theme? Some songs have wide-ranging themes (such as Tupac’s “Changes”) and some have a narrower theme (like Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper,” which is about suicide).

- How is the song’s take on its subject and themes different from other songs?

The Universality of Music

As we shift to analysis of texts as our major focus for the second five weeks of the term, we will use three different forms of media -- music, TV/film, and finally advertisement -- to practice integrating academic concepts/writings into our responses to these popular mediums.

Our first goal is to see these mediums as alternative texts that we "read," and to also see the larger artistic and cultural statements implicated in them.

Our second goal is to dissect each of these alternative texts into individual rhetorical parts to understand what their statement is, and how they do so.

Our third goal is to connect the individual statements of a text to larger "academic"/global disciplines. In other words, we are working towards making a connection between the themes and ideas present in an individual text to those in the larger fields we will ultimately work in.

For example, our first voyage together will be examining music. Beyond entertainment, why do we listen to music? What does our music say about humanity; about us as individuals? What can we learn by dissecting a song? Well, if we take a fun but serious look at song lyrics, we may be able to uncover sociological, psychological, political science, gender studies, even physiological/biological understanding.

To begin our voyage as a class, let's look at Tupac Shakur's globally-popular "Changes."

• The song lyrics

• Cultural implications, even today! Shakur's song made the Vatican's mySpace playlist!

• Here's another link, from CNN, that mentions a few other songs on the Vatican playlist.

• Here is the YouTube music video...

So, after we discuss the above links, and dissect the song together, let's look at the songs that we brought in for today's class!

• What song did you choose?
• What genre(s) would you say your song belongs to: love song, political/social issue, elegy (commemorates the dead), adolescent rebellion, psychological struggle, or some other genre that you can "see"?

Writing Activity

• Beyond entertain, what else does the song do for you?
• Which particular line or a few lines really exemplify the song's meaning?
• What do those particular lines tell us about the singer's point of view on the subject of the song?
• What are some larger ideas about life that we can take from the lyrics?

Homework:

• For Thursday, bring back both your song lyrics, and what you wrote today...

• You may also bring in an article that "discusses an important idea about music." This last statement is intentionally vague. I'd like you to use your critical thinking skills to find an article that you find will be relevant to analyzing music lyrics! We'll start discussing ways of getting outside research, and on-line databases is one avenue.

1. One place to look for an article, if you have a Chicago Public Library Card is their on-line databases...
2. Another place to find an article is the East-West U. library databases.

• Search these databases with terms that relate to themes/ideas you are dissecting in your analysis of your song lyrics. For example, in looking for sources that may help me analyze Shakur's "Changes" I might put together a search of these terms, mix and matched: politics, music, race, racism, war, music, protest, rap, drugs, social ills, violence, media portrayal,. . . .