The World of Advertising - Year 8

A teacher of mine used to say 'there is no money in poetry, but then again there is no poetry in money'. One of the possible meanings of this idea, is that those who are driven by profit cannot appreciate the things which offer no financial incentive. Creativity loses its purity when it is used as a means to trick people into handing over their money. Money, one could argue, transforms art into a pretty way of lying.

There are few industries more fascinating with regard to this idea than advertising. It is a business which is fuelled, and indeed judges success, by money... yet there is more creativity on display in some advertisement than one sees in a lot of supposedly 'pure' art.

As my Year 8 class have been discovering, advertisers are having to constantly reinvent themselves. The ultimate message is almost always the same - 'give me your money'. This is true even with charity advertisements which supposedly are manipulating us on the side of good. The way that advertisers do this has to be reinvented with every advert however. There is nothing most people would less like to do than part with their hard-earned cash, especially if they have the slightest suspicion that they are being tricked... which is why the art of advertisement is so subtle.

If you want to advertise shaving gel to men, you have to hide where they are most likely to bump into you - in the pages of men's magazine, in the posters of the men's changing room at a gym, in the ad-break at half-time of a football match. And you have to think of crafty ways to appeal to this audience once you have their attention... you have to do something that nobody else has ever done before every time you start a new advertising campaign.

Your assignment - to be handed in at the start of next week is a choice between two possible tasks...

Option 1

Design an advert for the product of your choice. It can be anything... a new Jacqueline Wilson book, a new type of shoe, a chocolate bar, or whatever you want.

If you choose this option, I want to see the following things:

1. A small sample of what the advertisement would look like. This can be as detailed as you want, so long as it is tidy and gives me an idea of what the advert would look like.

2. A short piece of writing explaining the thought-process behind this advertisement... it must include the following information:


What is the product?

Who is your target audience?

How have you managed to appeal to this target audience?

What other advertisements did you look at for ideas on how to advertise this product? In what ways were they useful?

What is there about your advertisement which is different from anything else on the market?

How have you used typography in your design? (font-size, text-positioning, etc.)

Where do you think this advertisement would appear?

How have you used the principals of advertising? (newness, nostalgia, happiness, etc.)

Your piece of writing should be around 3 quarters of a side of A4.

Option 2

Find an advertisement that you think is very effective. It could be one from the top of this blog entry or it could be one that you find elsewhere on the internet.

Write a short analytical piece of writing explaining:

Why do you think this advertisement is successful?

What techniques has the advertiser used to make their product appealing?

What is the target audience?

How has the advertiser appealed to this target audience?

How has the advertiser used typography?

What types of images are used in the advertisement?

This should be around 3 quarters of a side of A4 and include a copy of the original advertisement.

Good Luck

Writing a Speech - Year 9

For me, one of heroes behind the Obama campaign is a man who has risen to fame for his ability to co-write some of the most influential and beguiling speeches in recent history. I am referring to Obama's Head of Speechwriting, Jon Favreau.

Obama himself is a highly talented writer, speaker and all-round political personality. What we learn from Favreau however, is that no matter how talented and popular we are, we are never so good that we don't need the advice of experts from time to time. At just 28 years of age, it is astounding that Favreau has already managed to make his mark on the eternal history of oratory by knowing exactly how to play to the emotions of his audience and how to use a shrewd blend of facts and opinions to create moving and empowering public addresses. Yes we can.

As you write your speeches in groups for the 'Numizen' project, I want you to consider the example of Obama and Favreau. Whilst the 'Proposer' and 'Seconder' may be speaking separately, there is clearly much you can do to help each other prepare your debates - the same goes for the opposition. Similarly, 'The Chair' may well wish to assist both sides of the argument with possible ideas whilst preparing their own notes and informing their opinion on whatever topic they are debating on next week.

Remember... now you have covered the idea of 'Delivery', your foci are 'Writing' and 'Research'.

For writing, you may wish to consider:

1. Have you considered how to play to the audience's emotions?

2. Have you used any rhetorical questions?

3. Have you included a good amount of evidence and used statistics?

4. Have you used any anaphora?

5. Have you introduced the topic and any key terms and technical vocabulary that may give you the appearance of being an expert?

These are just some suggestions.

On the topic of 'Research', here are some helpful websites to get you started, of course make sure any sources you use are reliable.

· Amnesty International website www.amnesty.org.uk and student@amnesty.org.uk
· Racism: www.srtrc.org
· Globalisation: www.globaldimension.org.uk
· RSPCA (www.rspca.org.uk
· Countryside Alliance www.countryside-alliance.org
· www.communitypartners.org.uk
· The 16 basic rights of the Human Rights Act are available at www.crights.org.uk/law/uncrc.html
· First-hand accounts of refugee life are available on the Refugee Council’s website www.refugeecouncil.org.uk
· Website of the Human Rights Unit www.humanrights.gov.uk
· Crime: statistics published by the Trust for the Study of Adolescence, www.tsa.uk.com
· Crime: Organisations such as the Howard League and the Prison Reform Trust
· Groups campaigning on youth justice, eg http://web.ukonline.co.uk/howard.league; www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk
· UN Convention on the Rights of the Child www.unicef.org/crc
· International Red Cross: www.ifrc.org
· Family Rights Group: http://www.frg.org.uk/index.asp
· Youth Parliament: http://www.ukyp.org.uk/

Good luck!

Poetry As Revision - Year 10 (introduction)

In many ways, poetry is the purest form of revision.

Taken literally, re-vision means 'to see something again', which is, in many ways what the poet is trying to do at all times... to see something again, be it a lost love, a view from a bridge, the innocence of childhood or any of the infinite experiences that make up our lives.

There is also the sense of 'revision' which refers to changing something (eg. 'the revised version of the text'). This too is surely one of the concerns of the poet, who can not help but present you with a 'revised version' of their experiences. When Scannell hacked at the nettles in his garden, surely he did not think for a second that he was genuinely cutting away at 'raw recruits'... but given time and consideration, the memory was 'revised', altered, filtered through the poet's memories of WWII. And when he was ready to put pen to paper, Scannell offers us a 'revised version' of a memory.

The most common use of the word 'revision'... at least in schools... would perhaps best be re-named 'revisiting'. The form of revision seen most commonly in schools is the 'note-taking', 'fact-storing', 'data-cramming' variety which allows us a greater chance of passing an exam by keeping all of the key information in our brains... at least until the exam is over. Funnily enough, it is for similar purposes that poetry became so popular.

In the oral tradition of poetry, long rhyming sequences were constructed as a way of holding a lengthy story or even an important piece of news in one's head whilst travelling from village to village. The spreading of information was once reliant, not on bandwidth or phone-signal, but on one's ability to construct effective rhymes with which to store information.

It is for this reason that one of the most effective ways to remember crucial information is to construct a poem out of it, tying it to a series of rhymes anchored in your mind. As you complete the task relating to the character of Portia in the earlier post, I want you to think about how much information about the character you can fit into a piece of rhymed verse in such a way that you will remember the key facts about this character.

Metamorphosis - Year 7

As my Year 7 class are sure to have noticed this year, some of the greatest and most influential tales ever told are about people being metamorphosed into animals. We largely have Ovid to thank for this. We have the tale of Arachne being turned into a spider by the jealous Minerva, the tale of King Midas with his unfortunate donkey-ears and, though we did not get the chance to cover it in class, we also have the tale of poor Actaeon - who was turned into a deer and killed for no other reason than that he accidentally walked in on the goddess Diana standing naked in the forest.

Greek Myths were one of the very few things on the agenda when Shakespeare was at school, so it is hardly surprising that many of his fantastic plays draw influence from Greek Myth. We have the tragic untimely death of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' reworked and repackaged as 'Romeo and Juliet'. We see the tragic rape of Philomel (and the ensuing gruesome eating of children) make its way into the lamentable tragedy of 'Titus Andronicus', and we see the Trojan War as the setting for 'Troilus and Cressida.

Shakespeare's most famous nod toward Greek myth however, must surely be 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The play ends with a comedy-staging of 'Pyramus and Thisbe', but that is not where the similarities with Greek Myth end. Shakespeare also borrows the idea of 'metamorphosis' from the Greeks when he has Puck transform Bottom so that he has the head of an ass. He wakes up in the forest to find, unsurprisingly, that all of his friends are scared of him and he has no idea what is going on.

In the spirit of metamorphosis, my challenge for my Year 7 class is to write a descriptive piece (no longer than one side of A4) as if they have just been transformed into an animal.

The rules are as follows:

1. Write a short descriptive piece in the 1st person as if you have woken up in the body of an animal.

2. Do not name what that animal is, but rather make the reader guess through your decriptions of the way you move, the way you see the world and the different feelings you might experience in this body.

3. Try to use a wide range of vocabulary and sentence-lengths to make your writing as entertaining as possible.

4. You may wish to use the internet to find out information about your particular animal to give you an idea of what it might be like to be that animal.

I have written a couple of example introductions to give you an idea of what I am looking for. Can you guess what each animal is?

Example 1:

The ground scraped gravely on my neck and belly. My skin grew ever-more dry and callused as I dragged myself over the floor. It took all my mind’s focus to co-ordinate my countless segments of spine to take me just an inch. I could feel myself becoming drier with every second and took the opportunity to lay in a puddle, resting the tips of my tongue in its murky coolness.

Example 2:

I tried to call out to my friends but all that came from me was a horrible screech. I shook my head, hoping to shake this horrible nightmare out of my mind, and felt a strange flap of skin on my neck wiggling from side to side. Needless to say, I was terrified, and out of instinct I tried to run but all I was able to muster was a pathetic stagger as I jutted my head backward and forward to give me momentum.

Bassanio n' tha Hood - Year 10

So, I have been thinking about the nature of Shakespearean speech lately whilst teaching it to my Year 7s and 10s. How strange we find it - the idea of a load of chaps stood around on a stage talking in rhythm and rhyme whilst propagating bawdy sexual references, objectifying women and basing their life's success on how much money they are able to accrue. Then the shuffle-function on my iPod quite poignantly redirected me to the Dr. Dre album '2001'. There it all was - the sexism, the preoccupation with material wealth, the violence, the tenuous excuses for rhyme. Clearly, the vast majority have mis-judged the whole rap-genre - these men aren't sexists, homophobes, avarices. They are fundamentalist Shakespeareanists!

Well, in the spirit of the hip-hop genre's tireless efforts at keeping the Bard of Stratford's moral schema alive, I have crafted a little street-soliloquy from the point-of-view of that delightful little sponge, Bassanio. My assignment for the Year 10's - To construct a similar response to the storyline of 'The Merchant of Venice' from the point of view of Portia. Print these off in the end of the lesson and hand them in so I can see what you have been able to come up with!

Criteria For Success:
1. The rap must be made entirely of rhyming couplets
2. It must be written entirely from the perspective of Portia and give a sense of the character's feelings.
3. The rap must be at least 14 lines long and no longer than 40.
4. Add details here and there if you wish but you must refer to events that actually happen in the play.

Mr. Brown's Example...

Bassanio’s Rap

Let me tell you all the story of a usurous Jew

who tried to take a pound of flesh from one of my crew.

I had to borrow some ducats from my homey Antonio

so I could go to Belmont and play at being Romeo

but all of his gold was tied up overseas

so we had to go to Shylock and get on our knees

we thought he was doing us some kind of favour

but he wasn’t - it turned out flesh was his flavour.

I took a few friends to go see Portia,

she wasn’t just rich, but she was equally gorgeous

and she remember me from years ago

when I arrived she said ‘oh my god it’s Bassanio’

but even though it seemed I had her love in a basket

I still had to choose from one of three caskets

One made of gold, one silver, one lead,

each with an inscription, this is what they said…

Gold said – choose me and get what men desire,

That seemed a bit snidey – no smoke without fire.

Silver said – choose me and get what you deserve,

Like I’d ever choose that – unless I was beserk

But the lead one said ‘hazard all you have’

Which is pretty much nothing, so I gave it a stab.

As it turned out, I’d picked the right box for real,

It was like a Shakespearean Deal or No Deal!

But before we got married I asked my sweetheart

Do you think I could quickly borrow Daddy’s credit card?

My homey Antoney’s in a bit of a ruckus,

‘Cos to get me here he borrowed 3000 ducats.

She said ‘Of course my love’ as she took my hand,

And so began my life as a kept man.

I got back to Venice, it was all going down

Shylock was preparing to extract his pound

But just as it looked like bad would win over good

We pointed out that he was allowed to spill no blood.

The Jew dropped his knife and started going ballistic,

then he got his comeuppance for being sadistic.

Because Shylock had shown no humanity

we took his money and made him convert to Christianity.

The moral of the story’s quite simple to me,

Neither a borrower or a lender be.

A Cento

Cento -

–noun, plural -tos.

1.	a piece of writing, esp. a poem, composed wholly of quotations from the works of other authors.

2.	anything composed of incongruous parts; conglomeration.

There are 43 poems of WWI secreted in the following cento. Special prize for whoever gets all 43...

Cento

Move him into the sun -

let him hate you.

The undone years, the hopelessness

molten right through.

His whole face kissed the mud among the apple trees

poor young chap, wrapped in dangerous safety.

Knocked silly with guns and mines,

the whims of murder, sprawled in the bowels of the earth

the bones of comrades;

saints in broken shrines - a dust whom England bore.

Dark earth and wire - sinister threat lurks here,

the poignant misery of dawn - sunlight seems a bloodsmear.

Immortal darkness on strong eyes -

poor unpitied Caliban dribbling black blood.

He will never walk that road again.

Strange-eyed constellations, the magic of spring.

Youth feels immortal - never such innocence again.

Mangled limbs and dying groans have challenged death.

Blind with blood and waterfalls of slime

he howled and beat his chest -

the pain leapt like a prowling beast;

acid vapours hovering dense creep back silent.

The November sky quivers the shell-chopped trees

- mankind perished utterly.

The breathless air outside the misty pains,

the tenderness of patient minds.

Why don’t they come?

No man knows why.

Will they ever come?

Does it matter?

Voices of Silence - War Poetry Pondered

Talk of Typicality

Teaching A-Level English will always bring you back to the Front Line at some point or another. Perhaps not immediately, but you will eventually find that all roads lead to Ypres, all doors unto D-Day and all um... Valleys onto Versailles. And whenever  faced with WWI from a sixth-form perspective, it is usually towards the same overwhelming question we are pushed. 'How typical is Poem X of War Literature?' or 'Compare Extract B with Extract D... how typical are they of War Literature?'

That word, 'typical', has always seemed fairly haunting to me when talking of The Great War. Partly, of course, because there is nothing 'typical' about that particular conflict - which is why it is so heavily written about. Perhaps posterity has given the War an air of typicality, and if that is the case, it is much to the detriment of the human race. The idea of literature of any sort being 'typical' of it therefore seems to slightly undermine the gravitas of the subject. Things may well be typical of a genre, certainly. Nobody would bat an eyelid at the idea of discussing a 'typical sci-fi novel', or 'a play typical of the restoration era', or 'typical conventions of Canadian poetry'. It seems a little more difficult however, to discuss the typicality of a piece of writing in relation to an armed conflict which had an infinite number of manifestations, depending on one's level of involvement. There were clearly as many perspectives on The First World War as there were pairs of eyes to witness it, and there will continue to be as many more perspectives on the conflict as there are people to read about it for the rest of time.

This is, however, just one of the reasons why it is so difficult to discuss whether or not a piece of writing is 'typical' of WWI writing.

The First World War made poets of almost everyone it touched. A seemingly inexhaustible supply of verses and letters and all that lies between were found in trenches, private collections, billets, hospitals, etc. This has given rise to a popular myth among students of English however, founded upon the following chain of thought...

1. Lots of people wrote poetry during WWI

2. Most of this poetry wasn't any good - how could it be?

3. In schools, we are only exposed to a very small amount of the poetry that was produced from this era.

And here is where the non sequiturs arrive...

4. The small amount of poems we are shown of that era are, whilst being the best of their kind, typical of WWI literature.

and more frustratingly...

5. The poems that I have not been shown from the era probably have not been shown to me because they aren't very good.

I must admit, I was wholly guilty of making the assumptions numbered 4 and 5 when I was at school. I was of the opinion that everyone in England was writing glib jaunty verses about giving what-for to old Boshy, and having a chance to show those Frenchies how we do things in Blighty. Then when they got to battle, they would all turn into slightly worse versions of Wilf and Sass, disillusioned, inconsolable, Modernist poets calling upon the twin disciplines of Romanticism and Imagism to show the world the bleak, undiluted horrors of war. And women just went on oblivious to all this, and having a frightfully nice time working in factories, feeling the amazing liberating freedom that comes from having to work a 9-5 job.

This was more or less the model upon which I based 'typicality' on when looking at War literature. You think war's a good laugh, you turn up at the trenches and become Colonel Kurtz, unless you're a woman, in which case you just hum an upbeat tune and fail to notice the thousands of men coming back to Britain with missing limbs. Unsurprisingly, I was fairly wrong on this count.

Whilst contemporary sensibilities may hold Owen to be the best of the War Poets, typical he certainly was not. Take, for example, this extract from Owen's most beguiling poem (in my humble opinion) Mental Cases:

'Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,

Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,

Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicket?'

I would never argue that this is not a fantastic poetic phrasing. Aside from the fact that skulls do not traditionally have tongues. Scholars will also suggest that Owen's poetry, like Sassoon's and Rosenberg's is read more widely than your average poet of the same era because it is more timeless. What we actually mean when we say 'timeless' however, is 'in vogue'. Owen's poetry is not timeless by any stretch, but it is certainly congruous with how we wish to view WWI today.

Compare Owen's writing with this piece written by a Hospital Orderly from London around the same time:

"When the war is done we'll recall the fun-

The fun that conquered the pain-

For we'll owe a debt (and we'll not forget)

To the jokes that kept us sane:

How the wounded could laugh and bandy their chaff

and kick up the decue of a row!

It may be, in peace, when the sufferings cease,

We'll be sadder, are sadder, than now."

I know which piece is regarded as the greater literary achievement out of this poem and 'Mental Cases'. And I know the reasons why. Because Owen's poetry is more "honest" about the war.  "Oh sure, some of the men would keep their spirits up with some bouncy little fatuous scribblings, but they weren't as honest as Owen." By which we mean that Owen's poetry is more fitting with what today's Western society thinks about war, and the people who take part in it. We are looking at WWI from across a gulf in which lies September 11th, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the abolishment of the death penalty in Britain, the Vietnam war, the invention of the term 'serial killer' (I believe this was first used to refer to Ted Bundy) and the Holocaust, to names just a few of the deciding factors about what the 21st century needs The First World War to represent. It is convenient for us to think of it as 'the first big clue that let everyone know how evil the world is', 'never such innocence' and all that.

What then are we to make of the countless bouncy bit of verse we find from soldiers who faced the war and used writing as a way of keeping themselves chipper? Should we see these as being the atypical ones?I assure you, there are enough poets who saw action in WWI and still took a sense of jingoistic pride to out-weigh the poised social consciences of Owen and Sass. Take the R.A.F. Captain 'ffrench' who writes harrowingly of 'the fields where Death's harvest lies' in Song of the Aeroplane. Fields of 'Death's harvest', I might add, that were contributed to by the poet's 'eager bomb' with its 'deadly hum'.

How then, does 'ffrench's poem end? With an Owen-esque moment of despair at the horror created by him and his fellow man? With a Sassoonist call for an end to all war? With a Rosenbergian image of callous morbidness? No, no and no. The poem ends with the lines:

Proudly to Earth once again I'm returning,

Darkly to crouch till morning's fair light

Breaks, then again to the heavens go soaring,

Brave of the bravest, to-morrow we'll fight.

Far from being a remorseful tool of the government, the poet behind this piece appears not only to be proud of his own bravery, but also to see himself as an 'angel' of sorts.

Fecund is the world of WWI literature with work which bristles against the grain of our school-fed conceptions of gender-roles and the social climate of the times. Take the poem To a V.A.D. by the mysteriously anonymous poet 'C.D.'. We have here, the somewhat awkward depiction of a V.A.D. told from the perspective, presumably, of a wounded private.

"In these (and many other ways) you're piling up huge scores,

Now you are at our beck and call as we were once at yours."

The bitterness which pervades this poem is staggering. I think it to be a fairly well-written piece with regards to metre, clarity of image, strength of meaning, maturity of tone, etc. But of course we would not think it to be one of 'the good poems' of WWI because it differs so entirely from the paradigm du jour, all the way over here in Sunny 2009. In a post-suffragette universe, how could we ever applaud a poet who would write:

"They prate of sex and class and votes, of freedom and of land.

Don't heed them, dear, I beg of you; they do not understand

That once I've doffed my uniform there's but one thing I crave,

To come once more beneath your sway and be your willing slave."

This could in no way fit in with modern conceptions of WWI the way we'd like to see it. WWI was the moment when men realised how horrific the realities of modern combat were, and women realised that they could rise up into independence. Here though, we have an RAF Captain who can't get enough of flattening the German hoards and a man who seems to see the role of women to have switched from 'slave-keeper' to 'slave' as a result of the conflict.

I do not suggest that these opinions of Britain 1914-18 are more valid than the horrified eloquence of our more popular voices of the age. I would suggest however, that there is a strong case that the 'typical' voice of early 20th Century Britain is likely to be far less palatable to our modern sensibilities than we'd like. Britain was quite happily sexist, racist, elitist and imperial at the time of the war. I think it fair to say that a small handful of well-educated, upper-class, homosexual men who rubbed shoulders with the literati of the time, whilst perhaps being the most melodious, mellifluous and socially guilt-less voices of WWI as viewed a century later, they were anything but 'typical'. History is not only written by the victors, but revised by their grandchildren.

Tuning the Violin

Le Violon d'Ingres

The picture to the left is by Man Ray. The meaning of the title is derived from the idea of Ingres, the neoclassicist painter, being an equally talented violinist as he was painter, despite the fact that he was only famous for one of these qualities. 'Le Violon d'Ingres', therefore, is a phrase which can refer to someone's secondary skill - the one that they do as well as their primary pursuit.

Anyhow, in this blog I hope to create a secondary, extended discussion of the various topics which I cover throughout the English syllabus.