(I hate it when my 'puter crashes...)

As I was saying to you, English 101-b Spring Students, beFORE my computer crashed and lost everything I was typing...

In case you want to know my thinking leading up to the Essay 1 assignment, I am in brainstorm mode now. Your first readings in Signs of Life (SoL) are focused on both advertising and on consumerism; I'm considering showing you--maybe befoe you see this--Merchants of Cool, a documentary about marketing to teens and about the teen market itself (apologies to anyone having already seen it, but you see something new every time--I've seen it about six times). I also will assign a Visual assignment, which will ask you to look for ads or commercials with a provacative theme.

My ideas for developing your Essay 1 prompts that invite you to interract with the SoL essays, and possibly with visual sources you find are:

• Approach your topic as a marketer:
  
• What product would you market, and to what specific marketing category? What marketing strategies would you use to sell your product?
  
• Approach the topic as a critic:
• Analyze a series of ads in terms of their explicit and implicit messages. In other words, what product are they selling and how? Underlying that, what conceptual "payoff" are they promising you with their pitch?
  

However this assignment evolves, I have the expectation that you will draw from the provided sources--essays from SoL, and possibly Merchants of Cool--and possibly from your Visual Collection assignment. All sources need to be cited, and we will spend some time in class talking about the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation style for different types of sources.

Post here to give feedback or comment at any time during my development of this assignment!

That's it for now--
Donna