English 103
Fall 2010
Essay 4 – Visual Analysis
Purpose:
Essay 4 is primarily informative and analytical--and may also be persuasive--rather than
primarily expressive, reflective, or argumentative. In this essay, you will analyze a
specific ad that you consider especially noteworthy. To do so, you will bring a critical
eye to complex visual texts. You will need to be extremely sensitive to what is being
presented/represented; you will need to be equally sensitive to what is not being
presented/represented. This essay will invite you to interpret what you see, fill in
contexts, and assume a stance toward the material you are interpreting.
The ad can be from any source--television, magazine, billboard, Internet, or some
combination of these. Consider contexts and target consumers. Include print illustrations
if possible. Do not assume your reader is familiar with your ad.
Process:
Prewriting:
Spend a few hours reviewing ads from several different sources, such as
newspapers, magazines, billboards, television, radio, and the Web (including popups and YouTube). Choose two ads that you find provocative, and use the
“Thinking Critically About Ideas and Images” in Quick Access Compact, pp. 6883, to brainstorm ideas for responding to and interpreting the two ads. Review
your prewriting and choose the ad that seems the most provocative and important
to interpret, particularly in terms of how cultural expectations are fulfilled,
inverted, violated, enlarged, or presumed. For example, are our cultural
expectations about gender roles challenged when we see scantily clad-women
fawning over a newly-bescented young man in an Axe commercial?
Audience Analysis:
Now that you have chosen an ad, in a two-page document, analyze the target
audience for that ad. Keep the following questions in mind as you write about
audience. What does the ad imply about its audience in terms of specific gender?
race or ethnicity? education? class or income? religious affiliation? political
orientation? Does the ad presume shared knowledge of contexts, such as fashions,
fads, people, events, facts, or other ads? Does the ad invite its audience or viewer
to identify with a specific character or situation? (For example, an ad may invite
audience identification with a domestic female audience by portraying a
housewife complaining that the floor “just won’t come clean.”) If so, how is this
accomplished? What else do you know about the target audience? HINT:
KEEP THIS DOCUMENT FOR POSSIBLE USE IN YOUR ELECTRONIC
PORTFOLIO.
Drafting:
Review your prewriting about the ad and develop a specific arguable claim
(thesis) about how the ad persuades its target audience by using or manipulating
cultural expectations. In order to support your claim, identify three to five specific
elements of the ad that best demonstrate how it uses or manipulates expectations
or assumptions. Write an analysis asserting and supporting your claim. You
should include direct evidence in the form of direct quotations, screenshots,
photos, or scanned images, and your analysis should make direct reference to this
evidence as you support your claims.
Format:
Your essay should be 5 pages and should observe conventions for printing a
college essay (please use Times New Roman, 12-point font, double spaced, 1-11/4 inch
margins). In addition, you should be careful to observe proper format for citations as
indicated on p. 378 (MLA) or p. 421 (APA) in the Quick Access Compact.
Evaluation:
Essay 4 will receive a letter grade that will count for 15% of your final course grade. The
successful essay will be carefully crafted in support of its analytical claim, and will draw
meaningful conclusions about the uses of cultural expectations and strategies for
persuading the ad’s target audience. Essays that fail to make and support clear claims,
that have haphazard organization, or that are poorly developed will receive lower grades,
as will essays with surface errors so numerous that they interfere significantly with
communication.