English 1218: Essay #4
· Assignment genre: Contextual Analysis
· Audience: General
· Purpose: To analyze and interpret the news based on the common—but often confusing—visual commentary of political cartoons, and to present your ideas in a way that helps your readers understand the context in which such communication takes place
· Format: Essay; formal commentary with optional basic research
· Length: 2˝-4 pages
Explicating Editorial Cartoons
I have given you two editorial cartoons, one from a U.S. source and another from a foreign source. You can choose to analyze either. If you're not happy with the cartoons assigned to you, feel free to trade with willing classmates, either for one of their cartoons or both. It can be kind of like trading baseball cards, but please, let's not have any money involved!
Your mission in this assignment is to write an essay that (1) explains the sociopolitical situation the cartoon addresses, (2) explains the cartoonist's pictorial and written commentary on the situation, and (3) evaluates the commentary briefly according to its context.
Imagine that the cartoon and your accompanying essay will appear in a collection of student essays called Events and Comments: What Editorial Cartoons Tell Us About Who We Are. In some cases, you may need to discuss the historical/social/political context at some length; in some cases, you may want to focus more on helping your audience understand the cartoonist's attitude, showing how it fits in the context of the subject upon which it comments. Remember that your job goes beyond being "right" in your explication of the cartoon: your essay should become a mini-lesson in a historical/social/political moment.
Be sure to cite any outside sources in correct MLA format in the text and to create a correct page of works cited. See Harbrace 579-644.
· Content: The study of contextual analysis is simply the study of the text (and the cartoon is a text, even if there are no words), the message itself, but also the concentrated study of the context of the message, or the environment which applies. Since contextual analysis is the study of the environment or situation in which an event takes place, it must also include awareness of perceptions, since different environments can and will result in different perceptions. And since perceptions shape a person's or a culture's values, then contextual analysis must also include the awareness of and the study of values;
· Organization: Arrange your materials in the way that makes the most sense to you, but your paper should include a presentation/analysis of the issue upon which the cartoon comments, a detailed description of the cartoon, and an overall analysis of the cartoonist's interpretation of the issue;
· Voice and Word Choice: Make these appropriate to the subject matter and a general audience;
· Sentences and Mechanics: Vary your sentence structures, including simple, compound, and complex constructions; proofread for punctuation and spelling.
Schedule
Complete draft for peer review due Tuesday, December 7
Draft to be graded due at your "final" interview