Assignments: Batch Two: Assignment Fourteen

Analyse the connotations of gaze, posture and expression in magazine front covers.

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:

Focus on at least 6 magazine front covers for this assignment, comparing and contrasting them. It might be useful to compare some aimed at women with some aimed at men, or perhaps those targeting younger vs. older age-groups, or those which are more upmarket with those which are more downmarket. Displaying images side by side in your assignment can be a very useful strategy to focus attention. Back up every claim with the strongest evidence you can find. Verify your own inferences against the reactions of other readers. For basic readership demographics, the most accessible source for UK publications is the National Readership Survey (NRS) (see 'Top line readership' section). Remember that the models on magazine front covers pose: their postures are not those of everyday life which 'give off' largely unconscious meanings, but are chosen to connote particular relationships with the target readers. Compare the different implied relationships represented on the covers of magazines with contrasting readerships.

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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