CATEGORIES OF PAST USAGE
From our current historical perspective, using ads in the composition classroom may fit most comfortably with a critical/cultural approach. However, before such an approach became en vogue, other uses have often competed and continue to exist in some form to this day. I have formulated the following four categories predominantly by sifting through direct mentions of advertising in the major journals of the field. Such mentions are not rare, but direct consideration is certainly not plentiful. One possible reason for this status is a suspicion that advertisements are primarily the realm of communications departments. I suspect that many authors have also considered using ads as an activity of limited possibility (and therefore not worth extended pontificating). Though I obviously feel that both of these fears are flawed, it will still be useful to see where the field has been before we imagine how it can move forward.
Taste Building
It should come as no surprise that throughout the 1950s, English studies’ first reaction to popular culture was defensive; but to their credit, composition instructors were never ignorant of the student body’s fascination with pop culture. As early as 1954, James Steel Smith writes “that these freshman with whom we are concerned have lived and are living in a world of mass media . . . we can ourselves look at the movies, TV programs, and popular magazines and observe the childish or adolescent patterns therin” (253-54). Although instructors like Smith would never dream of using the popular in their classrooms, one could imagine them consciously forming a battle plan of increased exposure to literature and other examples of what Smith labels the “shifting pace of serious art” (254). Instructors with a stronger constitution towards the “fluff” of pop culture were willing to let it enter the classroom– but only as a Trojan horse filled with taste and discrimination. In 1956, Patrick Hazard proposes to “juxtapose slick fiction and classics; why does one surpass the other? Compare current TV drama at its best with past dramatic achievement [and] systematically assign movie reviews as themes” (234). Though Hazard does not specifically mention advertisements, his pedagogy encompasses a predominant spirit of the decade– mass culture is a threat, less to be dealt with directly, and primarily used only to point out its intellectual and artistic inferiority to “high” culture.
Therefore, I consider this category a conscious approach of omission with a value laden stance that anything from popular culture must be combated (and therefore is certainly not limited to the 1950s). In this sense it’s almost an anti-category. However, when not entirely based on omission, this approach serves to look at advertisements solely on surface levels. A 1957 workshop report from CCCC contains a brief suggestion encouraging students to point out advertisements’ “nonsense equations” (Study of News 169)– an approach that seeks to dismiss with a pre-determined reaction and enlist students into a war of cultural values.
Language Based
For a medium that relies so heavily on the visual and pictorial, imagine an approach that treats advertisements as a medium primarily useful for their language usage. As odd as this omission may sound, this approach also willfully ignores a historical turn that led ads to take on their modern character. In his book, The New Public, Leon Mayhew offers a history of advertising layout based initially on spacial restraints. Before the turn of the twentieth century, advertising space was sold by the agate square– a ten to sixteen line space that constructed advertising into informational modes (192). With the demise of the agate square, and an increasing amount of space and reliance on the visual, ads moved away from a use-based representation to a value-based one. This value-based approach soared with the mixing of visuals and text made possible by increased space for (and financial dependance on) advertising. This shift was the beginning of ads as the highly symbolic and often abstract medium we know them as today. But a language based approach to ads has little need for this history. Any popularity its methods ever had now serve primarily to point out the extent to which composition studies struggled (still struggles?) to keep up with the visual turn of culture.
While it’s hard to imagine ads used in the classroom today with no thought given to this visual component, D.G. Kehl’s 1975 article suggests a number of activities that do exactly that (though in fairness, these visual-less approaches are not his sole suggestions). The following are a summary of the language based concerns highlighted in Kehl’s article:
Although most of these suggestions involve a similar “bad example” approach as my previous category there are also notable differences. Looking over 1950s pedagogy reports, the fear of any form of popular culture in the academy (and perhaps society itself) is palatable to the point of comedy (primarily for the inability to clearly articulate exactly what those specific fears should be). By the 1970s, ads and popular culture are no longer the monster under the bed of our children– they can be brought into the light of the classroom and openly showcased as examples of poor linguistic execution. Such analysis is not performed for fear that students care for popular culture more than highbrow art. The fear shifts away from notions of cultural literacy and towards the more immediately perceivable fear that students will subconsciously absorb the language usage of ads in their own writings (Dieterich, 1974; Sharpe, 1985).
Classical Rhetoric
Whether one believes advertisements are direct pitches for the products in question, or if one believes they operate by more sinister methods of manufacturing need, their primary mode is obviously one of persuasion. Although Lloyd Bitzer’s long famous definition of rhetoric has subsequently been criticized by many authors, advertisements clearly fit his assertion that the rhetorical text is created by “some specific condition or situation which invites utterance” (3). In this sense, ads are pragmatic and participate in producing action– even if said action is helping you choose between fifty different brands of toothpaste or what kind of new car to drive off the lot. Therefore, in the quest to produce student writers capable of making their own persuasive arguments, the efficient and economical (no pun intended) presentation of advertisements can provide a useful jumping in point.
Using ads in this manner goes beyond the previous two categories to insert ads into a speaker/audience paradigm. Again, individual instructor goals may vary, but a classical rhetoric approach will likely focus on the ad’s attempt to sell the product. Students are encouraged to think of the ad’s nameless/faceless creators (or the ads themselves) as skilled speakers with persuasive goals, and analysis of logos, pathos, and ethos are useful frameworks for unpacking their persuasive attempts. Searches for claims, logic, and evidence can easily be worked into assignments; and one would not be want for examples in using ads to introduce logical fallacies. Inductive and deductive reasoning may also be introduced, and ads may be processed through an argument model (such as Toulmin’s) to assess rationality. This category additionally lends itself more than the previous ones to analyzing television commercials. With the addition of live actors and speaking parts, the rhetorical effects of delivery come into play, along with increased possibilities to analyze ethos.
If these analytical processes are viewed as the ad verus the student in a struggle for who’s more reasonable, the ads (by their very nature) are certainly going to lose the battle. In this sense, a classic rhetoric approach may appear more analytically complex than the previous two categories (and probably is), but is still an approach based predominantly in the negative-example paradigm. Instead of highlighting ads as representative of popular culture’s shallowness (or a transmitter of poor language usage) they are seen as poor arguments. I suppose the theory goes that students will become better argument makers themselves by tearing apart poor ones. The fact that most ads are about as sturdy as a strawman doesn’t make the critique part too difficult. I also wonder what good critiquing an argument genre can do if an instructor is not going to have students make their own arguments within the same genre.
Cultural/Critical
The thirst to instill students with objective notions of taste has (thankfully) largely died off, and there are many texts that could easily highlight language usage and poor arguments. None of the previous categories seem like they really have to use advertisements to accomplish their pedagogical goals. Perhaps this is why so many instructors were inspired in 1992 by the publication of Jim Berlin’s and Michael Vivion’s Culture Studies in the English Classroom. This seminal text heralded an important sea change in the composition studies field. Most often focused on Frierian-style liberation, the cultural approach in a composition classroom encourages (instills?) students with the analytical reading skills to “resist” a culture that is portrayed as hostile to democracy, overrun with capitalism, and predicated on power. When popular culture meets this approach, students often use semiotic analysis to uncover and reveal the injustices and oppression that reside behind the slick sheen of entertainment culture.
Culture studies approaches dominated the field for many years, and despite their subsequent criticisms, they do utilize advertisements and other texts of popular culture in ways that begin to address the uniqueness and contexts of the analytical items themselves. Additionally, the more complex and socially-integrated goals demand clearer articulations of pedagogy that led to scholarly writings more detailed in how ads could by used. Berlin’s 1992 essay, “Poststructuralism, Culture Studies, and the Composition Classroom” still provides one of the most practice-focused narratives of the culture studies hey-day. In the article, Berlin outlines his six unit course at Purdue where students were “asked to locate the key terms in the discourse,” then set the terms “in relation to their binary opposites as suggested by the text itself” (28). Imagine an old Marlboro advertisement with socially constructed notions of both “maleness” and smoking as rugged, rebellious, and independent– attributes that are privileged and not obtainable by all men (or any women). Once the binary has been defined in social roles, the roles “are located within more comprehensive narratives of economic and political formations in the larger society” (29). Perhaps Marlboro’s notion of maleness could be read as free from the constraints of democratic law (the cowboy sets his own code) and capitalism (if you will, a giant smoke sign F-you to the business world that would attempt to rein him in), particularly in ways not equally available to women. Students could presumably take my simplified summary of the ad and turn these ideas into a full-fledged academic paper, perhaps even analyzing the effect of the cultural code within their own experiences. Although this heuristic can be used with any number of cultural items, advertisements prove especially useful considering how the genre’s limitation depends so heavily on symbolism and suggestion in a quick and easily digestible package.
A "Radical" Starting Point
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