Unsettling the Drafts, Essay 2

Find your thesis and remember that it should:

• Include a few general interest sentences or a hook to get your reader interested
•   Explain in detail what you are analyzing (include specific names of the song, the artist, and the commercial/movie clip/parody/TV clip)
• Preview the parts of your analysis (the subpoints or the story for each song/video)

Example:  An analysis of Fun’s original video for “We are Young” alongside the Chevy “Sonic” Super Bowl commercial reveals that although the videos have similar elements, such as lyrics, slow motion camera movements, and chaos on the background, Fun’s video is ultimately a cautionary tale while the Chevy “Sonic” commercial is a about embracing youth and reveling in the moment.

Here are some other ideas to help you unsettle your draft: 

• Do you have a paragraph that discusses only the song lyrics on paper? Would doing so help set up your analysis better and/or help you show HOW the song changes when paired with a music video?
• Have you thoroughly described the setting, the character, the clothing, the music, or any other details of the videos you’ve only alluded to or briefly mentioned in your essay?
• Add dialogue or lyric quotations from the videos where you have only general discussion or brief descriptions. Be specific!
• Do you have a Works Cited page? Is it MLA correct? Do you have all 3 sources cited?
• Do you have an author’s note?
• Go through your draft and highlight/circle all of the pronouns (you, they, them it, he, she, etc). Replace vague pronouns with who or what you are actually referring to. For example, change “they argue” to “Geico argues” or change “he says” to “the camel says” or “the banjo player says.” Be as specific as possible! 
• Write a conclusion—think about what a reader can learn about visual rhetoric through this analysis. How can looking below the surface of a song change the way you see the world? How did the visual analysis change the message/story/argument of the song? Does your audience leave your essay with a feeling of why this topic is important? Does the video analysis teach any moral lessons—about relationships, about power dynamics, about music, about visual rhetoric, about emotions, about depression, about ANYTHING you find important or prevalent in your essay??
• If you think you are completely finished with your essay, read through your essay and write a paraphrase (one sentence) about each paragraph. If you need to write more than one sentence, your paragraph may need to be split into two or more paragraphs. After doing a paraphrase for each paragraph, read the paraphrases in order, as if it were it’s own paragraph—do your ideas flow? Does anything seem out of place? Do any paragraphs need to be re-ordered?