Student Name

Professor T J Walker

English 131

April 4, 2016

Short Assignment 1

Hi Erica,

How was it going? Now I’m sitting in the café where we usually struggled for our

midterms or finals together because it was just coming to a sunny rain on my way home.

Well, I just used this time to finish reading your long warm email that includes your

recent situation, random thoughts, anxiousness and self growth. It feels like you are now

sitting opposite. I read your letter again and again, I know you feel excited but nervous

about the upcoming symphony orchestra performance, however, what I want to say is that

that’s a too common reaction to something we treasure. Just relax and suck it up. Your

families, instructors, and friends are always stand by you.

Hopefully you will come back to college soon, professor TJ talked about many useful

ideas and methods to improve our poor English skills, as a reminder, you can find out our

lecture summary notes written by professor and our classmates on canvas, those

documents can be regard as an ideal makeup for your missed lecture. Because the latest

summary note had not been posted, I can explain some main ideas of today’s lecture. We

firstly reviewed some key words we have already mentioned last week, the first key word

is metacognition. Then instructors mentioned quite a few examples helping us

comprehend it. Other than a simple choice between A and B, metacognition is a deeper

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cognition. We should think deeply and have a plan at first, then monitor our work and

finally evaluate it. Besides, we discussed a phrase called discourse community: social or

professional group that share common values, goals by specialized genres and languages.

Clubs, football team or varied course all can be regarded as a discourse community. In

the second half of course, we joined group discussions to share ideas of each group

member’s chosen text relating to short assignment, and group discussion is a great way to

stimulate inspirations and help to better understand our materials. You have seen this

assignment, so I need not to repeat it. However, the searching process is not as simple as I

often thought. I spent nearly two hours to find an appropriate text for my short

assignment. In the end, I choose Rembrandt Foods’ advertisement as my referenced text.

Much of word’s economic growth is occurring in the rapidly developing economies, and

advertisements might prove a significant factor. Advertising aims to make people aware

of a product and favorable inclined toward it. It usually be designed with a logo or a

company name and other related information. With different target goal and audience,

size and type of presentation of ads are varied. It sometimes needs several creative ideas

to grab each customer’s attention quickly in order to pursued them to buy it, sometimes it

need to demonstrate detailed description of superiority which is more practical and

professional. My chosen text is apparently the latter one. (genre’s convention)

The first pic kinda like a title pointing the main idea of this brochure. Then take a closer

look at the second picture, except for a full and particular description of their global

supply chain with high quality eggs, it also mentioned some professional terminology

link HACCP, SQF and USDA to illustrate their exceptional quality assurance. Besides,

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pictures of factory’s diverse workshop were also printed near those words, and all staff

looks professional and disciplined. More over, the design style looks concise and clear.

With no completed decoration and uniform theme standard colors orange and white, it

also made this brochure look specialized. All those characteristic mentioned above help

convey a sense of professionalization and accentuate high qualities of the company’s

products. Also, the brochure was provided with some contact information below. The

third pic is a typical example of the use of non-standard English, advertisement’s designer

combined two normal word ‘egg’ and ‘exactly’ to a new word ‘eggactly’. In my opinion,

it is more like an ester egg, used with a silly and funny anagrammatic spelling to increase

interestingness and to achieve the purpose of attracting customers’ attention.

Overall, the point of publicity is the second page, however, those words seem a bit

complicated and not that attractive for people who definitely have no relation to egg

selling. So I would love to estimate that, instead for daily retail, the firm’s intended

audience are those large food companies or department store each with a higher

purchasing power compared with single customer.

Although we usually regard the business brochure and posters like ‘I has a dream’ both

are presentations of advertisements, there is a big difference actually. Public service

advertisements are usually publicized by non-profit groups, government and individuals

rather than profitable firms and companies. These organizations or individuals can not

directly profit from these work, but they do achieve their goals of grabbing your attention

of these social issues and persuading you to do something. Their propagandist means like

posting posters, showing a video on mobile media are similar with business

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advertisement. There are many familiar themes, such as global warming, human rights,

domestic violence, etc. This public service advertisement’s present form is “poster,”

which typically includes textual and graphic elements. In addition, different genres haves

a different impact on the audience. With fewer words and graphics, this poster featuresd

an image of a black man in an overcoat with his back turned to the reader, with a headline

‘I has a dream’ written over this man. The fFollowing text is a part of its original text

below the image ‘By now, you've probably heard about Ebonics. And if you think it's

become a controversy because white America doesn't want us messing with their precious

language, don't. White America couldn't care less what we do to segregate ourselves. The

fact is language is power.’ Obviously, the target audience are black communities who

speak black English. Lee St. James showed that he strongly disagreed with the use of

black English because black English is not standard and easy to recognize, and this poster

was designed for a public service purpose to ask black people to stop speaking black

English and have their children educated rather than publicize some products.

So those are my thoughts, and I want to kick around your ideas about this with you!

Anyway, wish you the very best of luck with your performance!

Yours sincerely,

Dora

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SA1 Rubric Outstanding Strong Good Acceptable Inadequate

-The paper identifies the genre and explains the impact of genre on interpretation for both texts.

-The paper offers detailed analyses that address the content, generic conventions, and the intended audience of the texts.

-The paper refers to the texts themselves to support its claims.

-The paper is written with the appropriate strategies for the intended audience (a classmate who missed class).

Dora,

This is a very strong first draft of your SA1, and it is even outstanding in several ways! If

you decide to revise, here are some additional suggestions:

1) You have many places where you observe key details in the two texts. Don’t

stop there! Remember to show the reader the significance of these details.

2) You do a nice job appealing to your audience at the beginning and the end of

the essay, but the middle part seems to lose touch with Erica. Adding a couple

more connections to show Erica that you are writing to her as an individual

would help.

Keep up the hard work!

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TJ

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