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What's In It For Me?

Study Hints: How to...

Be self-centered as you read this. Keep asking, "What's in it for me?"

Your benefits should outweigh your cost in time and effort in order to justify your careful study.

This website is going to change the way that you look at TV ads, shifting your attention away from content to focus on form: from what is being said, to how.

To achieve this end, the means will be a set of 10 lessons focused on basic composition principles as seen in TV ads which you then can apply to your own writing.

In American colleges, dozens of different composition textbooks are used. This website is designed to be a companion to any of them. You'll get a major amount of rhetorical help from them and your teachers.

From an attentive study of this website you can get two major benefits: you'll be better able to analyze any kind of persuasion (commercial, social, or political); and you will be better able to compose any kind of writing.

Ads are the best compositions of our age, skillful combinations of purposeful words and images.

If you simply dismiss 30-second spots on TV as trivial annoyances, they'll continue to annoy you, because they're not going to go away. You'll see tens of thousands more during your lifetime.

But, if you accept them as highly crafted "units of persuasion" and learn a new way to analyze their predictable patterns, then you can use them to your own advantage.

You've seen hundreds of thousands of these ads. According to the Gallup Poll, the average family watches TV about 7 hours a day. At 20 ads an hour, or 140 a day, we see 5 1,100 a year. By the time 6 year olds enter first grade, they've already seen some 200,000 TV ads.

To this, add radio commercials, magazine and newspaper ads, billboards, whatever. Thus, your memory already has a great store of available information, able to recall specific ads and plug them in to the principles and patterns presented here.

This website will give you some new tools by which you can re-sort and re-think a large body of your existing knowledge, some new ways to view ads in the future, and - perhaps most important to your immediate situation - some principles of composition to apply to your own writing.

If you're like most people, you've been entertained and delighted with some ads, but annoyed with many others as being interruptive, or boring, or trivial, or stupid, or offensive.

You've talked about "good" ads with your friends and you've complained about "bad" ones. You've probably discussed a whole range of issues about deception ("Is that true?"), legality ("Can they do that?") , morality ("Should they do that?"), technique ("How did they do that?"), intent ("Why did they do that?"), and consequences ("What happens when they do something like that?").

However, you've probably not analyzed ads, systematically, as units of persuasion. You know the surface details, but not the structures underneath.

Very few texts, very few teachers, and very few schools do anything at all about teaching students how to analyze this most common form of persuasion. My purpose in this website to do something.

I advocate that citizens in a democratic society need to know more about the techniques of persuasion used by everyone, but especially by advertisers and politicians, because of the growing inequality between these professional persuaders and average citizens, the persuadees.

Elsewhere in this Persuasion Analysis site, I've written simplified teaching aids for younger students. In this section, I write primarily for college students taking an undergraduate composition course.

This book is designed both as a companion to a college course in composition and a home companion for self-study.

If you are currently taking a college composition course, recognize that this brief period may be the last opportunity in which you'll have both an instructor and your peers focusing on the composition process.

If you are a high school student (Advanced Placement), this is a useful preparation for the newly required 25 minute essay in the SAT. In addition to gaining useful, practical, specific hints in some sections (e.g. Structural Parts & Time Limits), it won't hurt you to devote some more general attention to the overall craft of composition. Instead of fearing (or complaining about) writing an essay in 25 minutes, under pressure, deal with it. Plan. Practice. Prepare for it.

Just as athletes and musicians know that they need preparation and practice to improve those skills, so also, people acting in their role as writers need to rehearse their writing skills. For example, frequent short writing in daily journals can be compared to basketball players, alone on the court, just dribbling and shooting hoops, just to get the feel of the moves.

So also, you're going to watch TV and use the internet, seeing lots of ads. You might as well take advantage of them to increase your understanding of composition principles. If you are in school, this the very time when you can most easily talk to others about such ideas. It's an easy, interesting, and enjoyable way to focus on some useful principles and transferable skills.

As a self-study course, it's primarily directed to those adults not in college who now see the practical need for some way to upgrade their writing skills -- quickly, easily, and conveniently -- in their available time.

--- For more nuts-and-bolts details: on how online advertising works

Some Study Hints: How to use this Companion to Composition

Advertisers will provide the specific current examples: about 50,000 new TV ads every year. To analyze them, this site will give some tools: models (the Intensify/Downplay schema, the pitch) and prompter questions to focus attention on a specific aspect of an ad, or your own composition. Then, you need to be self-aware of where you are in a wider context (orientation), and when you change your focus (alteration).

Think about your own thinking processes. You can choose to focus. You can choose to shift. You can do it better when you are more self-aware of your options and your choices.

Advertisers may want you to focus on the content of an ad, but you can choose to focus on the form. For example, if you know the common and predictable patterns of ads, you can choose to focus on the structure of "the pitch," or pay attention to the elements of an "Image building" strategy being targeted at a specific audience.

For example, once you habitually look for the rhetorical structure of an ad, you'll transfer this to a greater awareness of structure of other compositions, whether it's your own writing, or the predictable patterns of TV newscasts and programs, or the traditional structures of lyric poetry.

If you appreciate the craft of a well-made 30-second spot, you're more likely to enjoy the craft of a well-made sonnet or sestina or short story. And, you're more likely to have a "sense of structure" in your own work.

The first four chapters of this book deal with the more general principles (purpose, audience, limits, structure) applicable to all writing, before focusing more specifically with concepts more closely related to persuasion and advertising.

Many of the principles here are often assumed, or internalized by writers: "everybody knows that."

However, some of these principles (for example, about "target audience" or "limits") may be new to you: that is, you've never consciously paid attention to them. But, once you read about them, you'll agree that they are just plain "common sense."

While it's easy to measure and test a person's recall of specifics, it's hard to measure and test a person's grasp of principles.

Yet, ultimately your goal should be to grasp basic concepts, to comprehend principles, and to apply methods, consciously and systematically, rather than unconsciously and haphazardly.

For example, as you watch TV ads, your mind should be actively engaged, by taking a specific ad and relating it to a general principle, or, by starting with a general principle and looking for it in a specific ad.

What you seek is not so much the "right answer," but a sense of control, or, of conscious mental activity.

People who understand principles, unconsciously or intuitively, are often described as having a knack for doing things. Or they are described by such interesting sensual metaphors as having a "sense of structure" or "a feel for timing," or "a nose for news."

Closely related to such a knack for doing things is an unconscious, or intuitive inference-making ability. Some people are better able than others "to take a hint" or "to catch on" to a joke: that is, to understand partial or indirect messages, to see a part and to infer the rest, to understand the implications.

You can develop and increase your skills in inference-making by a conscious awareness of, and an attention to, various non-direct and non-literal ways of communicating.

You can develop your own skills and sensitivities by trying to grasp principles and applying them to specific situations.

Analysis helps. Models help. Reflection helps. Practice helps.

Are ads worth all this attention?

No, but your mind is.

If you can better learn how to analyze things, to recognize patterns, to sort out incoming information, to see the parts, the processes, the structure, the relationships within things so common in your everyday environment, then it's worth your effort.