Media Analysis

First, the papers. Read over my comments. Re-read your paper. Re-read the assignment sheet. I am certainly willing to sit and chat with you about your paper, but that can only happen once emotions subside and I will only sit down with you and talk about your paper if the goal is genuinely for your improvement rather than something else.

There were A papers. There were B papers. There were C papers, D papers, and F papers. There always are. Awhile back I posted this about grade breakdown because it is a fair and accurate and broadly applicable explanation of what letter grades represent in writing. I will enter your paper grades today. The grading term ends tonight at midnight, but as I said before it opens again for adjustments later (ooooh, what does this mean?) so that if this devastated your grade (as in, you're not not passing or barely passing, not you went from a B- to a C+ or something), we can do some disaster recovery, but this option is only at my discretion and it involves quite a few other factors.

Remember that the letter scrawled at the end of this document is a symbolic indicator of your success on this assignment, it says nothing about you as a person.

On to MEDIA ANALYSIS. I love this stuff. I think it's so interesting and troubling and I find that video, Killing Us Softly 4 (2010), so fascinating and relevant every time I watch it. Consider Jean Kilbourne's opening remarks that she has continued to remake this film for the past few decades! While Susan Bordo's essay was published in the 1990s and sure, some of what she says dates the essay, it's relevance is still clear and she and Kilbourne have an important message. I hope you begin to notice these arguments being made constantly all around us. Awareness is the first step in being an informed consumer.

Your homework tonight has two parts:

Part I is to continue analyzing and annotating that advertisement/image that you began annotating in class. Then, choose one of your other ads (or, if you want a "better" one to work with, you can go find one online -- it's up to you) and analyze and annotate it using all of your rhetorical arsenal: Psychology of Color handout, yesterday's notes on image composition and design (see website for PDF of those notes), your EAA book, Bitzer -- EVERYTHING! Bring annotations and ideas to share tomorrow.


Part II is to read some combination of the following selections from chapter 23 of your Everything's An Argument text. You do not need to do a CRJ for any of these, but you should write down your comments, thoughts, responses, ideas, etc. to share. Each reading has "Respond" questions and I would suggest considering those questions as you're jotting down your ideas to share. "Some combination of" means that you need to read more than one of these. I would suggest reading three. They're pretty short passages and they're interesting.

"One Picture is Worth a Thousand Diets" p. 466
"Globalization of Beauty Makes Slimness Trendy" p. 474
"The Culture of Thin Bites Fiji" p. 477
"It's All in the Mix: A Plastic Reality Show" p. 480
"Turning Boys into Girls" p. 486

Questions about this assignment? E-mail me. Freaking out about your paper? Wait a little while, let the freak out subside. Calm down. Then we can chat.