BACK to Warren 10B: Ecology Syllabus

As before, do not simply follow the form of this prompt when writing your argument. Devise your own organization in order to present your material most effectively. Also, keep in mind that you will probably introduce material unfamiliar to your audience; you will need to provide summaries of this material, but don’t let them take the place of actual analysis.

PURPOSE: To think about the ways nature is constructed; To realize the quantity of such representations that permeate our daily lives; To think about the purposes and effects of these constructions on society and the environment.

You may either choose visual examples (images) or textual examples (words). For the sake of clarity, it is probably best if you do not attempt to combine both visual and textual examples in one paper. A possible exception might be if you found discrepancies between text and image in a single source -- like if an ad combined really beautiful, romanticized images with down-to-earth, realistic text -- or if you decided to consider text as an image (concentrating on the shape and size of letters, layout on a page, etc.) but such examples might be hard to find and even harder to analyze convincingly.

There should be some sort of connection between the examples, beyond simply being about “nature.” This might be topical (three science magazines, four articles on human cloning, six advertisements that discuss global warming, etc., five scenes of “natural disasters”) or perhaps functional (informative materials, entertaining materials, educational materials…).
In all cases, be sure to briefly describe each item you analyze; do not assume familiarity among your readers. If you are focusing on particular aspects of one of your sources, such as specific scenes in a movie, be sure to summarize those as well.

Magazines, newspapers, radio programs or advertisements, warning labels, short stories, print advertisements, Internet sites… If you decide to compare different media (say a web page and an informational brochure) be sure to take the effect the differences in the form of the message has on what is being (or not being) said. (For example, a television show might seem more “real” than a short story -- even if both are fictional.)

Movies, video games, children’s television programs (or adult), drawings, cartoons, maps, photographs, advertisements, calendars, catalogs… Again, be sure to take the effects of different media into account if you choose to explore more than one type of material in your paper.

Many of you have not previously been asked to critically analyze media in this way, although you may have been doing it informally already. Try to think about not only what is said, but also what is left out. How is the message being put across? What do you think the person who created the message was trying to achieve? Why might they have done things one way, and not another?

For example, let’s assume you decided to write a paper on images of frogs. You have decided to argue that how we portray frogs illustrates how people in general think about the relationship between humans and other species.

You might begin by deciding whether to look at cartoon frogs versus real frogs. Let’s say you decide to look at “fake” frogs. What do these frogs look like? You might choose to begin with Kermit the Frog. After explaining who/what Kermit is, you’d move into your analysis. Is Kermit the Frog realistic? Is he a happy frog? Is he a mean frog? How does he behave? How about the Budweiser frogs? Do they act like real frogs? If not, why don’t they? Or think about the game Frogger. What happens to the frog in this game? What is the point of the game? Again, you’d need to explain or describe Frogger and the Budweiser frogs for your readers.

Or you might decide that you’d ground your claim more effectively by analyzing representations of real frogs. Here you might look at frogs in nature magazines, in scientific journals, in children’s books, etc. How are these frogs portrayed? Are the images comical? Serious? Threatening? Cute? Is the frog one small image in a larger picture, or is it the main image? What is the frog doing? Are there any people in the picture with the frog? Is the frog healthy? Does anything seem to be missing from the picture? If you decided to include animated images, like nature shows on television, you might consider what difference (if any) it makes for the image to move, rather than be still, or make sounds, etc. What do the images tell you about how the person(s) who produced them feels or thinks about frogs?