October 29th Daily Blog

Today we started class with some tips on revising the intertextuality essay that is due tonight after revisions.  The essays are to be resubmitted and turned into turnitin.com in the second Intertextuality essay slot by 11:59 PM tonight.  The first tip in revising the essay to get the best score is be specific and realize which details matter.  Be sure to include the “who? What? When? Why? Where?” of a scenario and be as clear and specific as possible.  Remove the clutter from the writing and keep what matters the most.  The best writing is as efficient as possible and has the maximum content with minimal words.  A prime example of what to avoid is a clip the class watched of The Office. In this clip Michael Scott hits Meredith with his car, when he tells the office what happened he does a very poor job of getting the point across.  He never explicitly tells them that he in fact hit Meredith with his car even though it is figured out and known by the audience the entire time.  He also is not clear and specific and makes it sound like Meredith died at first. The next subject the class went over was the allusions seen in movies.  Allusions are a reference to an outside story or a real life reference.  A lot of the time allusions are used to define the audience by whether they understand the joke or not.  This breaks the audience into the dominant audience or the subsidiary audience.  An example of how the audiences are broken into Dominant and subsidiary is in a lot of Pixar films, an allusion is included to appeal to the parents that brought their children to the movies.  It is almost a reward to them for sitting through this entire children’s film and for paying for the tickets in the first place. This is seen in the movie Wall-E.  An allusion is made to the 2001: Space Odyssey film at the end of the Wall-E by playing “Also Thus Zarathustra”, when one of the overweight humans are trying to walk.  This is an allusion that the younger audience watching Wall-E will not understand but the older audience who drove the kids to the movies and bought the ticket will understand and enjoy, rewarding them.  This was all from today’s class.  Thank you for reading!