Brian Walborn Homework #2

In Chapter One of the book Everything's a Text, one of the things I personally found extremely interesting was how the Coca-Cola ads changed through time due to the change in social context in the different time periods. The thing I found particularly interesting was the drastic change of the aim of the ads from the two separate time periods. The book states that "The way the woman is portrayed in the ad, from her elaborate clothing to the delicate way she is posed, reveals the social context of gender roles in the early 1900s" (Melzer, Coxwell-Teague 23). The ad from the 1980s makes it clear that it is attempting to show friendship between races. Another thing I found especially interesting was the way Malcolm X changed his persona with the different audiences he was speaking to. For example, when he spoke in front of the Civil Rights group in Detroit, a low income area, he used a much more casual persona than when he spoke in front of Harvard Law School, a generally high-income white community.

In Chapter One of the Pearson reading, concept number two really came across as interesting to me. The statement that good writers address problems rather than topics seems like can definitely turn a good writer into a great writer. It is saying that a thesis statement comes from a thesis question which is the authors question about the main topic of the paper. Another thing that really stuck out in the first chapter was concept number three. This concept states that you have to think about what your readers want to hear and what they already know about the topic you are writing on. It's extremely important to know this so your readers stay interested.