essay proposal

1. What is your core IMPLIED thesis? Or stated in a different way, what is your opinion about consumerism and marketing that you are trying to get us to understand? Please state your thesis in one sentence, if possible. Remember, even though this sentence won’t be explicitly stated in your essay (instead, it will be implied through narration and description), it’s still absolutely essential to understand what opinion you will be attempting to SHOW your reader through your story/experience.

2. What SPECIFIC brand or product will you be focusing your narrative on and why?

3. For the Shames prompt, what specific experience will you narrate to ILLUSTRATE the harm your focus on consumerism and buying more of a specific brand or product may have caused in your life?

4. For the Norton or Frank prompts, how will you make YOUR EXPERIENCES central to your description of the intentional branding efforts of the product you are focusing on? What experiences do you intend to narrate or describe in order to SHOW the reader how your identity and the brand’s “identity” have become enmeshed (not clear where you end the “identity” of the product begins, etc.) due to marketing efforts as well as your own interest in aligning your identity with the one the marketers have created?

PART TWO:

Copy and paste TWO in-progress paragraphs from your E1 rough draft so that your classmates may provide some initial feedback on the direction and focus of your essay. These two paragraphs may be from the beginning, middle, or end of your essay, but they must be sequential (i.e. in order and pulled from the same beginning, middle, or end section). Please make sure these two paragraphs have been proofread and revised for mechanics and grammar issues (sentence-level errors) as well as for coherence and unity. Also, and this is VERY IMPORTANT in a Narration/Description essay, be sure you are SHOWING vs. telling with tons of active, meaningful verbs, action, descriptive and specific details, and sensory information. Review the Show vs. Tell Handout in the E1 Module for details.