Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is for you to:
• Further develop your thinking about an area of television studies that interests you
• Familiarize yourself with scholarly writing about television
• and connect your own thoughts about and experiences with television to ideas in scholarly writing
The paper: Compose a 6 – 7 page, double-spaced paper that analyzes the argument of an essay from the field of television studies and, as a conclusion, reflects on how the essay influenced your thoughts about and experience of watching a related program.
Aim for your analysis of the essay to bring insight to the topic that the author is discussing and why understanding it in the way the author advocates matters. This analysis could involve:
• identifying the essay’s thesis and explaining why it’s relevant
• summarizing the overall points of the essay, the author’s goals, key examples
• quoting key phrases and interpreting them
• paraphrasing key points and providing interpretation
• comparing the author’s conclusions to another source’s conclusions
As a conclusion (perhaps 1/3 of the paper), reflect on any ways that the essay influenced your thoughts on and/or experience of the program. You might discuss aspects of the essay that you found surprising, that you disagreed with, or that you agreed with to an extent, but would ultimately draw different conclusions from. Although your experience of the program is subjective (and it’s fine to use the first person pronoun when writing it), aim for this section as well to bring insight to the relevance that the author focuses on in the essay.
Research: You are required to significantly draw from at least scholarly source from the field of television studies that is in some way related to one of the course units: television’s production, form, systems of representation, and audience viewing practices. I recommend that you begin by browsing the recent essays in television journals like the ones below, which focus on television, and looking for an essay that interests you (you’ll need to log in through the library website for most of these):