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Snyder English 1A Section 1 Study Questions #1 Please answer these study questions on a separate sheet of paper. Your answers to these questions do not constitute a formal writing assignment, so you may handwrite your answers if you wish. However, if your handwriting is less than legible, typed answers are always appreciated!! There is no minimum or maximum required length for your answers to these questions, but I expect that a thoughtful answer will require you to write at least a decent-length paragraph for each question. 1. In “The Rhetoric of Advertising,” Hirschberg discusses several ways in which advertisers manipulate their audience (e.g. by using “weasel words,” by promising “social acceptance” if one uses a certain product of subscribes to a certain ideal, etc.). Using an example from current media (a TV commercial or a print advertisement), briefly describe how the advertisement you have chosen is designed to manipulate the audience. If you choose to use a print ad, please attach a copy of it to your response. If you use a TV commercial, please describe it fairly completely, because I likely haven’t seen it! 2. In Huxley’s “Propaganda under a Dictatorship,” he introduces the idea of “herdpoisoning,” and how Hitler used propaganda to “poison” his “herd” of followers. Now think about Hirschberg’s “The Rhetoric of Advertising,” in which he suggests that advertisers skillfully manipulate their audience to “sell” products or ideas. How do you think contemporary advertising falls into Huxley’s idea of “herd-poisoning?” Do you see a correlation between the two? Certainly the ideas of advertisers are broadcast to a wide audience (a “herd”), but that audience is often not an assembled mass—it is a person sitting at home watching television or flipping through a magazine. Do you think advertising is successful by “herdpoisoning?” Or do you think advertisers target each specific audience member on a more singular level? Use an example to support your answer—as before, please attach your example if it is a print ad or describe it fully if it is a commercial. 3. In “TV News as Entertainment,” Postman and Powers suggest that “the language of pictures differs radically from oral and written language, and the differences are crucial for understanding television news.” Certainly the same argument could be made in relation to print advertisements. Find one example of a print ad and discuss how the creator of the ad has used the “language of pictures” and “written language” to convey his or her intended message. (Please attach the print ad to your response.)