IMPORTANT NOTE: Your TA will advise you in section about anything to do with the various stages of writing this paper. This document simply collects all the stages in one place.

It is also a “€œHow to Write a Paper Manual”€ so if it is a bit long, that’€™s because it’€™s a kind of writing manual.

Most advertising these days goes far beyond trying to convince you of the value of a product’€™s attributes, such as, that it is bigger, faster, brighter, cleaner, etc. Instead, most advertising tries to associate the product with cultural meanings, values, and desires that have very little to do with what a product actually is or does.

If you combine that fact with the increasing spread of advertising throughout society, it is clear that one of the major channels through which culture is transmitted is through advertising. What meanings and messages do you see delivered through advertising and what does that tell you about the state of affairs in the cultural worlds you observe?

Write a paper that convinces your reader that advertising is like culture, and works as a system of perception and meaning, while making an interpretation of particular ads you have selected, their particular meanings and what you make of them in terms of the broader world.

Minimum Requirements

1. A specific argument about advertising in general and the cultural content you have selected in particular.
2. Some explanation to the idea of why advertising is like culture, as well as introducing the reader to the significance of the ads you have chosen in order to demonstrate this.
3. Detailed interpretation of the cultural messages transmitted in one visual ad you have chosen.
4. A convincing argument to the reader that the cultural messages that you “read” in the ads tell us something significant about the state of affairs in our society, our world, or in ourselves. (On this: Your specific topic and question for your paper is something you will determine in your Question Outline exercise—see below).
5. At some point or points in the essay where you feel it is most meaningful, make references to some of the ideas expressed in at least 3 course readings, using them to deepen your argument. For instance you might reference things about culture/power, race, about advertising culture, representation of the primitive, about mind/body or identity or whatever in the course seems relevant to your ad. These references make your essay more than just anyone looking at an ad and having some thoughts about it. The ideas you use will show that there is something revealed in the readings that helps you think more deeply about advertising culture.

For an audience, imagine you are convincing a parent. If your parent is an anthropologist or sociologist or expert on advertising, imagine someone else, like your roommate or a sibling. Your imagined audience should be someone who is thoughtful, but has not had a chance yet to think about some of the things you have thought about in this course. Of course, any of these people might be so different from your TA that they might be unsuitable, so in the last instance, imagine that you are writing it for your TA, when they first went to college. By imagining an audience, you do not specifically address a person, but imagine that they are reading it, and that you have to help them see what you see, think what you think. Your thoughts should express the fact that you have taken this course and not just random interpretations anyone might make.

Step-by-Step Manual for the Paper

In this term paper, you will describe and interpret 2 closely related visual advertisements that you think deliver an influential cultural message.

In the preparation for the final paper, you will collect representative samples of advertisements and then narrow down your analysis to a single pattern or tendency you observe in the cultural messages of advertising.

The essay you write will be about no more and no less than 2 ads. In the course of the essay, you will uncover cultural messages and then present a convincing argument about the importance of understanding what you have uncovered.

Step 1: Browsing
Look through any advertising you can find for any interesting patterns and identify a tendency or pattern in cultural messages that seems particularly interesting. Aside from simply trying to sell a product, what other kinds of messages, meanings, values are being transmitted through advertising? You should feel that these messages are influential and powerful, as well as interesting to you.

You will not at any time need to “prove” that the tendencies or patterns in advertising message which you select as “influential” are in fact influential, by counting the ads in 100 magazines or some other way to quantify them. For the purposes of this paper, it is good enough that you observe them to be influential, and feel that a reasonable reader will understand and be convinced your argument about why the ads are meaningful.

Step 2: Collection
Then, you will begin to collect physical advertisements, most likely from newspapers and magazines or print outs from internet sites that carry the single tendency or pattern of messages you are interested in.
Long text ads are not permitted—it needs to be primarily images, although they might also have text in the ads.
Your TA will notify you if they accept other media of advertising for your paper and how to deliver it to them. (For example, screen capture files).
LINKS ARE NOT PERMITTED FOR SUBMISSION OF SAMPLES BECAUSE THEY ARE UNSTABLE. Screen capture files work well instead.
Probably 4-5 visual ads as your initial sample will do at this point. 2 will also do, if you feel sure and excited about the first 2 you find, and the 2 ads represent a single tendency or pattern.
Remember, you can always check in with your TA about your ideas.

Step 3: Focusing
Narrow down your selections for the paper. You will write your paper about only one tendency in advertising, and you will use no more and no less than 2 visual ads as demonstration material. Look at what you have collected and decide which are the best ads for illustrating the single tendency that you see.

Note: By the end, these ads must be handed in with the paper. Make back-up photocopies or scans. Physical papers will not be accepted without the physical ads, or photocopy or scan or other method specified by your TA. Of course, you tend to want things to look good, so the physical ads or a quality color scan printout is best, but a photocopy can work just as well if some emergency arises. Your TA will be concentrating on the writing. If you are submitting electronically your paper must contain the digital copies of your 2 ads.

Step 4: Outline Draft Writing. THIS STEP IS TO BE HANDED IN FOR P/F GRADING AND CREDIT—see TA due dates.
Get your ideas down on paper in chunks of writing. Some of these items below will be explored in section before you have to hand them in for credit. These will be building blocks for thinking about your final paper. This assignment will be graded Pass/Fail. Use separate pages for each of the stages below:

1. About the Chosen Ad: Set aside a period of time to brainstorm on the overall messages you see in the ad, and why they are important. Put the ad in front of you and write out your thoughts and impressions on what the ad seems to be saying, which might also include what fears, desires, needs, or suffering they seem to be playing upon, and what solutions they might be offering to those problems, lacks, or desires. Sometimes, what you see can be very subtle in the ad, sometimes very overt. In either case, it is you who has to assert what message is there, and convince your reader. The ad may not come out and say it directly. Perhaps, you can think of the ad as a strange, almost foreign, symbolic language and translate what it is saying into words. Write fast and write about 2 full double spaced pages
   (you might try this on more than two ads if you aren’t certain which will be “the two,” and then pick the two to hand in with your expanded outline)
2. Choose 3 quotes that will be important for your argument from the readings. Write a separate page about each of these quotes as they pertain to the topic of this paper and/or the ads in particular. Write about a page on each quote
3. Suggest Your Thoughts and Conclusions: Finally, you should keep in mind, just generally, the gist of all the lectures, readings, and films, and the whole process of developing critical thinking on culture. Taking a critical approach to advertising as culture, what do the ads tell us about the state of affairs in our world, our society, or in ourselves? What these ads “tell us” about the state of affairs in our world, our society, or ourselves may or may not be what they mean to say. Instead, someone using critical thinking (you), sees what the ads show us about what is going on with people today. That is your vision, what you think about the world based upon what you see in the ads. Is there anything about your vision that goes with any of the ideas from the course? Write 1-2 pages about ideas you are having about what these ads, and the ideas you discuss, say about the state of affairs in our world. This is a chance to get the reader to see the world your way, based on your observations and arguments. Write 1-2 pages.

Later, go back and make grammatical corrections and any other edits to these parts you would like to make. You will hand this to your TA at the specified date. After you have done 1-3 on your own, you can proceed to 4 below, and hand that in as well on the same date.

1. Write a Question Draft. This will be explained in section. Identify one main specific question that your essay will be the answer to. Imagine that your paper was the answer to a specific question about your ad and about advertising culture, and that your professor had chosen the ad and asked you to write an in-class bluebook essay answer. What is the question?
   Write the question, then answer it generally in about 1-2 double spaced pages.
   This is a way of checking whether your paper will have a good, motivated and focused purpose to it. The TA will use these especially to give you feedback on what is the best line of questioning to pursue for your paper.
   Save a copy for yourself, and turn in all of the above in steps 1-4 at the specified date (will be specified after the mid-term). These will be saved by your TA for later reference when grading your Final Version. The TA will give you back a copy—if submitted electronically—with some comments, or just comments if not submitted electronically. See TA instructions.

Step 5: Write the First Draft
Review your TA feedback, particularly recommendations for what can be your central question. Write an essay that is the answer to that question! Don’t include the question in your essay directly. Make sure the essay contains the elements specified on page 1. How you mix and include these ingredients is up to you and depends on what is the most natural way to write an essay that is the answer to your question.
As you write the first draft, you might draw upon some of the ideas you wrote in the brainstorming stage, or you might strike out in a new direction if the question you are working with has changed a lot from the first round.

How to Approach Your Main Destination (the ending for your first draft):

Think of yourself as a psychiatrist analyzing your patient’s dreams, only instead of a patient, it is a whole group or even the whole country’s dreams you are analyzing. Interpret the cultural messages and meanings in the ads, so that your reader will say, “Oh yes, I see you what you mean. I see that too, now that you showed it to me.” Explain to the reader why it is important to recognize the cultural messages. Usually, interpretations of ads tell us something about what is going on in our world, our society, or ourselves: some condition of the world, etc, that is reflected in the ads. In this concluding section, you want to connect with the reader and get them to see the importance of what you are saying.

How to Approach Incorporating Quotes and Class Materials:

You should use concepts or ideas in the quotes from course readings which seem relevant to what is going on with advertising so that your idea is different than what anyone just off the street would think at first glance, who hadn’t read those things.

Step 6: Re-writing and Revision
Revision is not the same as editing for grammar or correcting errors. Revision is a more deeply involved process (you will proofread later). Of course, when revising on a computer, you will not be retyping every last word. But neither will you be simply cutting a word here or there or making the language correct. You will be forming and shaping the organic whole of the essay, this piece of writing that is your paper, your creation. Take your draft from Steps 5 above, and shape it into a streamlined 8-10 page paper:

1). Go back and write or re-write the best introduction you can, now that you know how the essay is going to end. You might be able to use some of what you wrote for your Step 5 draft in your new introduction. Don’t give away too much at the beginning, but do give the reader a clear way to know where this whole essay is leading: toward the main point of the essay.

2). Then, rewrite the body of the essay, making sure to have every message you uncover line up with what you set up in the introduction. Extra observations and ideas can be cut out if they do not line up with the argument you set out in the introduction. This part is probably where you are going to cut down the most.

3). Finally, rewrite the conclusion so that it represents your best thoughts about what all your interpretations of the messages finally tell us about our world or ourselves, which is your main point of the essay. You might wind up writing more, or more deeply, than you did in Step 5, so you might have to trim this down.

Step 7: Proofread and Edit

Read your revised draft aloud to yourself. By reading it aloud, you will often be able to hear when it sounds awkward or incorrect. Fix it up by making it read smooth and easy. Pay attention when one paragraph doesn’t seem to flow from the previous one, when one sentence doesn’t seem to follow from the previous one, and when sentences seem awkward and unnatural.

Have someone else read your work aloud to you. This will uncover more awkwardness and room for improvement. You will read your work aloud in a way that will disguise some problems but you will hear those problems when someone else struggles to read your text.

You could also paste copy into Google translate to hear it read aloud but google will not struggle with reading, so it’s a third “point of view” different from either self or other.

Finally, correct spelling, word usage, and grammar errors.

Wednesday June 12: 12PM Noon LAST chance to hand in final papers in accordance with your TA’s instruction

The Paper is due at the latest 12 PM Noon June 12. It is the last moment to hand in the final paper according to TA instructions. Some TAs may require you to submit your paper as an email attachment or upload, thus requiring a scans of your 2 ads.

FORMATTING INSTRUCTIONS

All papers must be 8-10 pages, not including ads or references cited, double-spaced, in Times New Roman 12 pt. type, with 1” margins all around, and all pages numbered. This upper and lower page limit does not include the title page, which should have the term paper’s title, your name, your TA’s name, and the section name on it. A separate page should include any bibliographical references, and is not counted in the page total, nor does the total include the physical ads.

References in your text should include only course readings and the ads. Everything else in the paper should be your original idea, or be related to lectures (in which case, you do not need to reference the lectures). When quoting or explaining something specific from a cited text, references should be in parentheses at the end of a sentence, right before the period: (author’s last name_year: page number) as in (Geertz 1973: 34). When making a general reference to the overall idea of a piece, where there is no specific page that has the whole idea, you just end with (last name_year) as in (Geertz 1973). It is possible that at some point, probably in the beginning or conclusion, you will either quote from, or explain in your own words, something from one of the readings, and therefore will need to put a reference at the end of the sentence, and include a bibliography page. The bibliography page should have the full reference, put into any standard academic form.

If you are submitting a physical paper, then paper Ads should be fastened to blank paper and inserted in between text pages as fits the reading experience of the paper, or they can be fastened to blank pages attached at the end of the paper. The whole paper, including ads, must be one piece.

All papers must have no more and no less than 2 ads. You should photocopy or scan back-ups in case of emergency. No papers will be accepted without ads. Making scans and having electronic copies are of course required if you are submitting electronically.

Your TA will present further policies for turning in the paper and for any alternative media, if permitted by your TA.  

Sample Solution