Paper One

3-5 pages, double spaced, 12 point font

Due Feb. 13 through turnitin.com

For this paper, you’ll need to find an advertisement, either one you can tear out or print out and turn in or a commercial you can get me a link to (you’ll include the link on your works cited page).  Look for something with some complexity to it; ads that use humor or irony should work well for this assignment.

Your first step is to do some prewriting:  Go around the circle of elements with your ad.  What is its Purpose?  From what Point of View is it told?  What are the most important Concepts it touches on?  What Assumptions (stated and unstated) does it make about the audience?

Next, revisit Nosich’s section on Impediments in Chapter Two.  Paying close attention to the Assumptions and the Concepts you’ve isolated in your ad, ask yourself, “What Impediments to critical thinking does my ad hope its audience has?”  In other words, does your ad depend on us vs. them thinking (even if it’s in jest)?  Does it poke fun at our tendency to base our views of life on movies and TV shows?  Make sure at this point that you can say more about your ad than that it relies on the Impediment of basing our view of life on the movies because it’s an ad of a beautiful woman wearing mascara; you want an ad with enough depth to go beyond the obvious here.

Your thesis statement should give your opinion about the ad’s Purpose in conjunction with its Assumptions about the Impediments we, its audience, have blocking our critical thinking.  

The body paragraphs of your paper should back up this thesis by giving specific examples from the ad, keeping in mind that your reader will have access to the whole ad but may disagree with you about the ad’s Purpose or about specific Assumptions or Concepts in the ad.  Think of yourself as proving your opinion to a skeptical audience.

This means somewhere in the body of your paper you should include a concession and refutation, first conceding to a different way of seeing your ad (or its Purpose or some aspect of your analysis of it) and then refuting that concession by showing how and why your interpretation is still valid.  We’ll talk about this more in class.

Your conclusion should go beyond simply restating what your paper has said; answer the question “So what?; show your reader why s/he should care, what s/he should take away from your analysis of this ad.

Some Pointers:

Every ad’s Purpose, in the final analysis, is to sell a product or service.  Saying this is your ad’s Purpose will probably flatten out the ad and the paper.  Instead, think about how your ad works toward this ultimate Purpose: does it work towards name recognition? Try to stick in your memory? Use sarcasm?  Thinking of the other elements in terms of a more specific Purpose will increase the complexity of your thinking and your paper.

You do not have to use all 8+ elements of reasoning in this paper, but you should be using those that are most pertinent to meeting the assignment with your particular ad.  You may use Nosich’s terms for the elements without citing Nosich, but if you quote or paraphrase Nosich, he should be on your works cited page.