In this assignment you will edit together your best insights from your Semiotic Analysis, your Narrative Analysis and your Cultural Analysis (attached below) and add any additional thoughts you have about the show you’ve been working on all semester to write a comprehensive critical essay for academic critics. You will demonstrate that you can use multiple concepts from academic TV criticism to demonstrate critical insights of interest to academic critics.
Show: Modern Family
Comprehensive Critical Essay instructions
Format: APA 7th edition (see general format instructions here, follow directions for Student Paper in APA 7)
Length: 2000 words, or approximately 8 double-spaced typed pages. Maximum length 2250 words
You will need to write some new material for this final essay, but I expect you to edit and integrate your best insights from your earlier assignments.
With very few exceptions, you will have to REVISE your earlier material to clarify your writing and integrate it into the argument of your Comprehensive Critical Essay. If you copy-paste writing from an earlier assignment, please put it in “quotes” and cite yourself to avoid the appearance of plagiarism.
In preparation, gather together all of the writing and thinking you have done about your chosen show in this course, including the graded discussions and assignments. Read the instructor’s feedback and peer feedback to see what ‘worked’ for them.
Here are the required subtopics you should cover in your essay
Highlights from your semiotic and visual style analysis (edited, main insights presented with evidence)
Highlights from your narrative analysis (Todorov and Character analysis, edited)
Cultural analysis (edited, questions you posed must be integrated into analysis of the show using concepts from Rhetorical/cultural criticism ch. 6 and / or Representation ch. 7)
Since you already wrote about Story and Genre (Narrative Analysis) and visual style (Semiotic Analysis) and you have been writing your Analysis section (in your Cultural Analysis assignment), you can incorporate your best insights from these and other ideas you may have had into the final essay. You must EDIT all of this material to clarify the writing and integrate it into your argument. If you copy-paste writing from earlier assignments, please put it into “quotes” and cite yourself to avoid the appearance of plagiarism.
You should re-read the sections from the course textbook chapter that you chose to work with, and look up the concepts that you use in the textbook glossary to be sure you use them correctly. For example if you’re writing about stereotypes, that was discussed in Chapter 7 Representation of the textbook, so you should reread the section on stereotypes and be sure you’re completely familiar with the concept. You’re being evaluated on how well you use these concepts and techniques that were presented in the course, so be sure I understand what you’re doing.
Chapter 10 is an example of a comprehensive critical analysis of the Big Bang Theory. It is longer than our final essay is required to be.
Required organization of your essay
There are example essays linked at the bottom of this prompt. Each person’s essay is going to be specific to the show that they worked on and uniquely the product of their own interpretation. Copying someone else’s essay could make yours’ worse, not better.
This assignment calls for an expository/persuasive essay that convinces us that your analysis and evaluation of the program are reasonable and well supported by the evidence. This is not a research essay; no need to quote other critic’s opinions, we are interested in YOUR point of view on some of the topics in Chapter 9 and what they tell us about the show you analyzed. Like any academic essay, it should have the following structure that clearly and explicitly presents the required elements of the assignment:
Introduction: (a) an introduction with a thesis statement that encapsulates the main point of the essay and states the purpose of your critique, (b) A very brief summary of the show’s premise and characters, production information about the episode(s) you have chosen (c) a thesis statement that clearly summarizes what you’re going to argue in your essay. Underline the thesis statement for clarity (1 page)
Definition and description of your critical approach to the program in which you clearly define and discuss the key concepts and categories of analysis you chose to work with. (1 page)
The body of your essay (5 pages) contains your interpretation and analysis of the show, illustrating your argument with specific examples from the show. The body of your essay will be separated into sections that cover the topics you chose from Chapter 9. The following topics from the Chapter 9 (‘Guidelines for Television Criticism’) are possible: Story and Genre; Structure of the Program; Demographics (target audience); Context; The Look of the Program and its Codes (Visual Style); as well as Analysis and Judgement. You don’t have to write about every topic. The specific topics you choose to write about depend on your analysis of your show.
A conclusion with your overall evaluation and summary of thoughts about the program (1 page).
A separate References page in APA format should give correct APA reference for the show and episodes that you wrote about, and the sources for theoretical ideas (textbook chapter, videos, external sources). Remember that APA references take the following format:
Writer, W. W. (Writer), & Director, D. D. (Director). (Original air date). Title of episode (Season number, Episode number) [Tv series episode]. In P. Executive Producer (Executive Producer), Series title. Production company(s).
Grading Criteria
In order to do well on this assignment, you are required to:
Use several academic TV criticism concepts that you learned about in our course (examples: disequilibrium, taxonomy of character, mise-en-scene, identification, ideology, representation, stereotype, polysemy, dominant meaning, intertextuality) to interpret the show you’ve chosen. Give a definition or example of how the concept is used (there is a glossary of terms in the back of our textbook.that defines all of the key concepts). Don’t use ordinary dictionaries for definitions of academic concepts, they will not be correct.
Present a clear and nuanced argument about the show you’ve chosen to analyze, summarized in a thesis statement that appears at the end of the introduction to your essay. Remember that an expository/persuasive essay makes a claim about a topic and justifies this claim with specific evidence. The claim could be an interpretation of the show’s representations or its ideology for example. The goal of the argumentative paper is to convince the audience (me) that your thesis (stated in the introduction) is true based on the evidence you’ve provided from the show.
Develop a critical analysis that is appropriate for academic criticism (example: feminist criticism is interested in gender-based inequality and representation; ). Academic critics are interested in two main things: How a show achieves exceptional artistic effects and / or emotional reactions in the audience OR how a show represents or misrepresents social groups and characteristics that we seldom see on TV. Academic critics are not interested in entertaining their readers through clever wordplay, selling a show through superlatives, or exploring the individual taste of the critic.
Here is an example essay that demonstrates what I am looking for.
Rubric for the Comprehensive Critical Essay is on the assignment link
Length: 2000 words, not including title page, abstract and references. You CANNOT exceed the total maximum length of 2250 words.
Audience: Academic TV critics. Please think back to the assignment on ACADEMIC TV CRITICISM. You are not writing for the general TV audience — you are writing for academic TV critics.
Format: APA. The only works that MUST appear in your reference list are the episode(s) of the show that you are discussing (see Other non-print sources, Television Broadcast or Series Episode), and at least one relevant citation from our textbook (the definition of an important critical concept that you used, for instance). If you choose to use additional works to clarify your thesis (not required), they should also be listed in the reference list using appropriate APA format. The reference for O’Donnell’s Guidelines for Television Criticism is: O’Donnell, V. (2017). Television Criticism (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA.: Sage Publications
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