Writing 100 - Transition to College Writing   Tags: course:100, instructor:naydan, section:008, subject:writing, term:fall, year:2012  

Welcome, please consider this guide as a foundation for finding resources to support research related to Writing 100-Consumerism in Post 1945 America.  This resource provides introductory information on accessing library resources and services as well as information on how to find specific advertising campaign resources. 

This resource is faceted based on the kinds of materials being accessed: Getting Started, Visual sources and Secondary sources.

Paper 3: Rhetorical Analysis of a Post-1945 Ad Campaign (6-7 Pages / 1800-2100 Words)

For this assignment, identify an advertisement or a series of advertisements involved in a post-1945 ad campaign, explain how the ads use rhetorical strategies to target an audience, and determine the success with which they target that audience. In other words, explicate image, text, and context in your ad campaign with the goal of explaining how an argument works or doesn’t work.

The range of what gets marketed in America is impressive to say the least, so you have a lot of ad campaigns (broadly construed) to choose from. The campaign you choose might sell a product, a person/persona, a music album, a profession, military service, a countercultural (or paradoxically anti-corporate) identity, or even an ideological perspective. The more we think about our existence in capitalist terms, the more we realize that consumer culture is pervasive.

You’re writing this essay for the academic audience of your classmates, hence your essay should include a clear and precise thesis statement, clear topic sentences that make debatable claims, and supporting evidence of those claims including but not limited to the following:
• At least 4 reliable secondary sources that give historical context and/or provide critical readings that you agree or disagree with. Two of these sources can be essays about consumerism that we have read in class (Readings out of Glickman’s Consumer Society in American History: A Reader and the Twitchell reading) and the other two should pertain more directly to the specific ad campaign you’ve chosen. Remember to use MLA style to cite your sources internally and in a Works Cited page. Note, too, that you’ll also need to cite your primary sources: the ads!
• Summary and paraphrase of significant aspects of the ad campaign.
• Explication of your summarized and paraphrased material that connects it to your main idea.

For more description see course syllabus.

See http://www.lib.umich.edu/ask for additional contact methods.