let your brain go crazy thinking about the class material without censoring yourself. Length is somewhat important, only because it indicates the extent to which you put effort into thinking on the page: shoot for three pages minimum.

In those three pages you'll have a lot of crap, and probably way more ideas than you can use in the actual essay, but you might also get to a more original, vivid idea about the news show texts than if you had started in a more typical "first draft" kind of way. JUST TRY IT, for this first essay at least, and see if approaching your writing process with an SFD as step one tends to open things up, or at least keep you from sitting in front of a blank Word document for three hours before you can write anything. Trust me, I've been there. It's painful, I know. :) SFDs helped me, and maybe they will help you, too!

1. small amount of research, if necessary. When analyzing ads, it's often helpful to understand something about the company that produced them, like how the company positions itself compared to its competitors, or what's going on in this company's industry. For example, it would be helpful to know that McDonald's is fighting against perceptions (um, like, scientific fact) that its food is unhealthy when analyzing their recent "We're local, too" billboards.
2. Analyze the messages conveyed in the ads you find, based on the fifteen different kinds of appeals in Jib Fowles "Advertising's Fifteen Basic Appeals" essay. What are the primary appeals in each ad? Are the primary appeals the same in both ads, or do they change? Why do you think the advertiser chose to use those appeals for this product? Can you tell anything about the audience for the ads, given the appeals? And, crucially (this applies to all these questions): how can you tell? What specific, concrete details from the ads made you come to your conclusions? You will need to explain the ads AND Fowles' appeals (including introducing who Fowles is, and what his essay is all about) to your reader - don't assume they've read Fowles or seen your ads. Please don't include the ads themselves in your essay - you need to describe and summarize them rather than include them.

Helpful Hints:

• The most difficult part of an analysis essay is going beyond just summarizing what you see in the sources you find. In order for your essay to be successful, you will need to discuss what each media source is implying as well as what they are outright saying. You will also need to explain the significance of what's being implied. In other words, what are these sources trying to make us believe? How do they do this?
• The most successful essays will not just identify interesting features of the ads, and the differences between them, and how they use appeals, but also say why it matters. Why is it interesting or important for your reader to notice what you've noticed about these ads?

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