Assignment Preparation: Read through the data about Wage Disparity given in Canvas, depicted online, on TV, or in print. How many visual representations come to mind? Then do a freewrite on what those representations have in common and on makes each of those representations different. Then ask yourself: which one of those representations seems to be the most interesting or complex?
Length and Formatting: 3-5 pages (750 – 1000 words), typed, double-spaced, with a left-justified margin and black 12-point Times New Roman or Garamond font.
Assignment Preparation: Read through the data about Wage Disparity given in Canvas, depicted online, on TV, or in print. How many visual representations come to mind? Then do a freewrite on what those representations have in common and on makes each of those representations different. Then ask yourself: which one of those representations seems to be the most interesting or complex?
Prompt: Select a visual representation (e.g., graphic, chart, poster, pamphlet, billboard, webpage) of the career or major that you are a member. Analyze how that representation is achieving or not achieving its creators’ desired effect. The point here is not to evaluate the representation, but to walk your readers through the specifics of how that representation is working, or attempting to work, on a group of viewers.
Please limit your focus to 1-2 key strategies that the creators of the representation use; these strategies should come from our unit two activities. Also, you should include at least one image in your essay. We will talk in class about which images require special permission to use.
Audience: Local high school seniors who generally believe what they see online, on TV, and in print. These students are avid and usually unreflective consumers not only of products but also of images—of ideas. Imagine that they are reading your essay as part of an extracurricular club on exploring life and work paths.
Rationale: Although you will probably not write visual analyses throughout your life, you will encounter many occasions, in and after college, when you must break down how a topic is working, asking yourself what its key parts are and how those parts relate to each other. Paper #2 gives you practice making precisely those moves. Moreover, there is a level of specificity required in Paper #2. Finally, by forcing you to include a visual, this assignment acknowledges that writers may communicate not with alphabetic text alone but sometimes—depending on the occasion, the genre, and the audience’s needs—with alphabetic text in conjunction with other methods.
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