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.