Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [102]
All explanations and interpretations occur in a context, which functions like a lens for focusing your subject. An important part of getting an interpretation accepted as plausible is to argue for the appropriateness of the interpretive context you use, not just the interpretation it takes you to.
Look for a range of plausible interpretations rather than assuming only one right answer exists. Control the range of possible interpretations by attending carefully to context.
It is interesting and sometimes useful to try to determine from something you are analyzing what its makers might have intended. But, by and large, you are best off concentrating on what the thing itself communicates as opposed to what someone might have wanted it to communicate. Besides, intentions can rarely be known with much accuracy.
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Assignments: Making Interpretations Plausible
1. Build a Paper from Implications. Begin this assignment by making observations and drawing out implications for one of the topics below. Then use your list as the starting point for a longer paper.
Having done the preceding exercise with inferring implications, you could now make up your own list of observations and pursue implications. Make some observations, for example, about the following, and then suggest the possible implications of your observations:
• changing trends in automobiles today;
• what your local newspaper chooses to put on its front page (or editorial page) over the course of a week;
• shows (or advertisements) that appear on network television (as opposed to cable) during one hour of evening prime time; and
• advertisements for scotch whiskey in highbrow magazines.
2. Analyze a Magazine Cover by Researching an Interpretive Context. Choose a magazine that, like The New Yorker, has interesting covers. Write an analysis of one such cover by studying other covers from the same magazine. Follow the model offered at the end of this chapter:
a. Apply The Method—looking for patterns of repetition and contrast—to the cover, so that you arrive at key repetitions, strands, and organizing contrasts and begin to ponder a range of possible interpretive leaps to what they signify.
b. Use these data to suggest plausible interpretive contexts for the cover. Remember that interpretive contexts are not simply imposed from without; they’re suggested by the evidence.
c. Then move to the other covers. Perform similar operations on them to arrive at an awareness of common denominators among the covers, and to analyze what those shared traits might reveal or make more evident in the particular cover you are studying. You will be trying to figure out how the magazine conceives of itself and its audience by the way it characteristically represents its “face.”
It might be illuminating to survey a range of covers by a single artist, such as Ian Falconer, who created the cover we analyze in the chapter.
3. Write an Essay in Which You Make Observations About Some Cultural Phenomenon, Some Place and Its Social Significance, or an Event (in terms of its significance in some context of your choice) and then push these observations to tentative conclusions by repeatedly asking “So what?”
Be sure to query your initial answers to the “So what?” question with further “So what?” questions, trying to push further into your own thinking and into the meaning of whatever it is you have chosen to analyze. Trends of some sort are good to work with. Marketing trend? So what? Trends in movies about unmarried women or married men or… So what? And so forth.
Since the chapter offers sample analyses of paintings and advertisements, you might choose one of these. Cartoons are interesting subjects. Here you would really have to think a lot about your choice of interpretive context. Gender?