Assignments: Batch One: Assignment One

Illustrate and discuss the importance of both social and representational knowledge in making sense of a current advertisement of your own choice in any medium.

Guidance

For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module, see the general criteria.

What Key Features Do I Look For?

  • Familiarity with relevant texts
  • Evidence - the stronger the better
  • Argument - coherent and balanced
  • Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories
  • Understanding of relevant concepts
  • Reflexivity - reflections on methodology
  • Examples - insightfully analysed
  • Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: Social knowledge is knowledge of the everyday world. This includes situational knowledge: knowledge of stock situations within a culture, guiding our expectations for relevant events in social interaction (e.g. of appropriate roles and discourses). Representational (or textual) knowledge refers to our familiarity with a range of media, genres, and conventions of form and content. We draw on both in interpreting any 'text' in any medium. We also weigh one against the other in making 'modality judgements' (such as whether what is represented is truthful, possible, plausible etc.). You may refer not only to social and representational knowledge but also more specifically to social and textual codes (in semiotics) and schemata (or 'schemas', from schema theory in cognitive psychology). Definitions of key terms can be found in Chandler and Munday (2011).

Do not simply offer a description and general commentary on the advertisement you have chosen: everything you write must focus closely and in detail on exactly what kinds of knowledge viewers must draw on in order to comprehend and interpret the ad. This is not easy, because we tend not to be aware of this in our everyday lives, so try it may help to imagine what an alien being or a robot would have to know in order to understand it. Although it is sometimes difficult to decide, be explicit about which knowledge is best described as social and which as representational (remembering that 'text' here refers to any kind of medium, not just words). For instance, it is not enough to note, for instance, that 'red connotes danger' without stating how you know this (in this case, for instance, how you know that it does not connote passion in this context?). Provide specific (and reputable) published sources of evidence for assumptions that you normally take for granted.

Note also that this is an assignment for which the inclusion of relevant pictorial illustrations is essential. These should be inserted electronically into your Word document rather than cut-and-pasted in. You can scan such illustrations in from print sources, save them from disk-based sources, download them from online sources (such as my Powerpoint slides) or even create them from scratch in a graphics package. Use them to help you to make points more effectively. Label each one, 'Figure 1' etc. and add a caption.

Some suggested reading

Note: Treat with extreme caution sources labelled with this symbol!


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