Consumer Essay

Part I: Composing your first draft

How do you decide what to consume? When do you decide to discard your possessions? The goal of this consumer experiment is to encourage critical thinking and self-reflection on your consumer identity.

The steps leading up to your final essay will consist of the following activities:

  • A. Prewrite. How do you identify yourself as a consumer? How might you need to change your consumer behavior, and why?
  • B. Rhetorical Analysis. Perform a rhetorical analysis of an advertisement for a commodity you currently own. Create a new ad—with images, slogans, and text—based on your own experience of the commodity.
  • C. Experiment. Sell or gift one commodity in your possession; purchase or receive a used commodity. Stage a series of photographs of the old and new commodities to tell their stories.

Part II: Putting It All Together

  • D. Synthesis. Revisit and revise your prewriting materials. Make a statement about consumer culture today, based on your experiences, class discussions, and class materials.
  1. You will create your consumer essay as a blog post.
  2. It must be at least 1500 words long and include at least 4 original photographs / designs.
  3. Your thesis should present yourself as a complicated consumer in contemporary society.
  4. Support for your thesis will take the form of concrete examples that you provide, which might include rhetorical analyses, personal photos, anecdotes, reader responses, or individual research (refer to the material you have read and produced for this course).
  5. You may incorporate materials from earlier blog posts, but you must revise or build upon any materials you reuse.

Part III: Peer Review and Reflection

  • E. Peer Review. What did you learn during peer review? Make a specific list of goals to undertake in your revision of this draft based on peer review
  • F. Reflection. Finally, in a separate blog post, reflect on all of the decisions you made in composing this “final” consumer essay. What original material did you reuse and why? How did you revise it and why?