RULE NUMBER ONE: Do not ask questions whose answers are already in the assignment. If you do so you only show me that you haven't read the assigment. So, first read it, then re-read it, and THEN, if you don't find an answer to your question, ask.

This final assignment is divided into parts:

• Part 1: You have to write a regular paper on the image Kellog's Raisin Bran
  • The paper should be 3 to 4 double-spaced, typed pages (NOTE: 3 to 4 means 3 to 4, NOT 2; DOUBLE-SPACED means DOUBLE-SPACED, not SPACED-THE-WAY-YOU-LIKE-IT). And please do not use fancy fonts that are difficult to read, and do not use fonts with a large size trying to make your paper look longer.
  • The paper is due on Friday, Dec. 8. Together with your paper I want your In-class essay, the two other papers you wrote AND (not an option) your journals.
  • We don't have class on Dec. 8, so you will leave your folders (FOLDERS, and I mean it. I will not accept anything that is not in a folder with your name on) in my mail-box. I will pick up the folders at 10a.m. Papers received after that time without an acceptable justification will be graded with a B or less).

• Part 2: You have to transform your paper into a hypertext for WWW
  
  • this part of the assignment is due on Wednesday, Dec. 13.
  • If you don't have this part done by 1p.m., your final grade will not be higher than B, no matter what you have done during the semester.

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PART 1

What you should do is to look at the picture, find the answers to some of the following questions, and organize the answers into a coherent, readable and meaningful paper. For general instructions on how to write the paper look at the Basic instructions for the first out-of-class.

Here is the picture:



Overall, you should ask yourself:


• What is the main goal of this ad?
• What do they want to sell?
• What do they seem to sell?
• What is the main message of this picture?
• Are there sub-messages that help to support the main message and/or hide other unwanted messages?
• What are the languages used by the ad? (verbal, visual, argumentative, persuasive, the language of desire, or what else?)
• Can you find out the basic appeals contained in the ad (need for sex, affiliation, nurture, etc.)?
• What is the ideology in the ad? (and, by the way, what is an ideology?)
• What is the context within which this ad should be read/perceived?
• Who is the privileged audience for this ad?
• How does this particular audience react to the ad? Why?
• How does the ad try to avoid an analytical reading of its message?
• How many different elements are used in order to convey the message?
• What kind of elements? Verbal? Visual? Others?
• How does the spatial organization of the elements help to convey the message? In other words:
  •  what is element X (person, object, part of the environment; what are its properties? Color, shape, size, represented motion, age, angle of perception, etc.)?
  • What does X mean in a social context?
  • In what kind of context do you usually find X?
  • How does the element X work in that context?
  • And in the context defined by the ad?
  •  How does the element X work when placed in a particular position in the image?
  • How is X related (spatially, in terms of meaning) to the other elements?

(Example: why do we have two male kids and one female? Why do they belong to different ethnic groups? Are their positions in the picture metaphors of social positions in the 'real' world? What about the wall? Why is it old? And the floor? Why is it new? And the stairs? And the T-shirts? Why do they all smile? What do they look at? Who is in the background? Why? Are there any priviledged centers/focuses in the image? Which ones? Is the eye attracted by these centers? How? According to the color? To the shape? Or to what? Why?)

I guess this is more than enough. With the answers to some of these questions in your hands (or in your brain) you should be able to come up with something interesting.

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Part 2

Not much to say for Part 2. What you should do is:

• save the picture in your home directory
• resize it according to your taste (here it is very big, so that you can see all the details, but you should resize it so that it is as big as the window of Netscape)
• create a map for the picture
• create links between some areas of the picture (the ones you believe are meaningful) and some other pages with explanations.
• Overall, the idea is that a reader of your page should understand your critical and analytical reading of the picture by clicking on different areas of the picture.
  Note that the reader does not have only one particular order to follow in order to access the different sections (unless you decide, somehow, to guide the reader through a path you have chosen). This implies that if you want the reader to understand your work, you need to create these pages with the explanations in such a way that they can be read and understood no matter what the order of reading is.
  This means that you should add some redundant piece of information in the beginning of each page, so that the reader knows what you talk about even if he or she has not read any other page. In other words, if you want to know if you have created a 'good' page you should answer the question: if I read this and only this page, do I understand what this page is about, and what the other pages more or less are about?