Problematizing Analysis: Discovering a Flaw in One’s Initial Account

Students generally try to write from a place of certainty at all times. But good writers develop their ideas, adopting initial understandings that are necessarily partial in order to leave room for growth. This allows them to guide their readers through simple stages into a complex understanding of a topic. Today I’m asking you to practice that by presenting an initial understanding and then casting that into doubt.

Taking your HW from class 8 as a starting point, write a first ¶ that summarizes your initial account of your ad’s appeal or sales pitch. Then complicate that understanding by deliberately casting it into doubt. Here’s a schematic outline of what I’m looking for:

1. ¶ summarizing the ad’s appeal or sales pitch—feel free to rewrite or reuse a ¶ from the HW for Class 8
2. ¶ introducing a problem or doubt about the account you just offered in ¶1. You should then go on to resolve that problem by achieving a new understanding of how the ad works, who it appeals to.
   • If you can present the “problem” in one sentence, you can do the problem and resolution in a single ¶.
   • On the other hand, if it takes several sentences to make the reader appreciate the problem, you’ll want to present your resolution as a separate paragraph.

The drama of this sequence will be enhanced if the first ¶ ends with attention focused on a aspect of the ad’s appeal that the next ¶ calls into question. For example, an essay on the “Slim Jim: Intensive Care” ad we saw for lecture might employ the following transition from ¶1 to ¶2:

… by these vigorous young interns. In this way, the ad invites potential customers to see themselves in the roles of the hospital’s patients, victims who are being rescued from emasculating women by the magic of bromance, mediated by a stick of meat.

This appeal seems stranger the longer one thinks about it—not just for employing a homoerotic undertone in a frat-boy context, but for inviting customers to think of themselves as losers….

The other question to consider in this example is whether the sentence opening ¶2 is in itself enough to make the problem manifest for readers. If so, one would finish that ¶ with analysis that grapples with the problem to achieve a deeper understanding of the ad’s method of appealing to viewers. On the other hand, one must often take a whole ¶ to flesh out a problem for readers, in which case the problem’s solution would have to come in a separate, third ¶.

Turn your ¶s in via the comment section, below.