Procrastination

    My biggest problem when it comes to school work or really trying to get anything done is procrastination. I happen to be very good at this and will stall for hours on things like trying to get my reading done or doing my chores. And the main contributor to my procrastination problem is media. I rather be curled up in a blanket scrolling through my Instagram feed then writing my essay. Or sending horrible picture of my face to my best friends on Snapchat then reading our current class book. But in the end I have to do this homework anyways and this causes me to be up late finishing my last paragraph of my essay when it could have been done easily a few hours ago. But still the temptation of seeing how many likes I got on a picture I just posted or watching a YouTube video keeps me from finishing my work at a decent hour. And I know if I just turned off my phone for a few hours while I was doing my homework it could be done so much faster. I also wouldn't keep falling asleep with my lights on every night because I was going to watch just one more video before I had to get out from under my warm blankets to turn them of. But I know in reality that I wont end up doing this, and will keep doing things like turning in my last media blog on Sunday night at 7:59 P.M.

Impacts of Slogans on Advertising

    Slogans have a huge impact one the way we view advertisements. They are used in a lot every brand and help you to memorize that specific brand. The goal of these slogans is to help you to memorize them and associate them with their product. They are also there to send a message out about their company and what they sell. Without some of the very memorable slogans we know today, we might view these brands in a completely different way.
    They're are some very memorable slogans out there and whenever we hear them we think immediately of that brand and what they do/sell. One good example is McDonald's. Awhile ago they came up with their slogan, "I'm Loving It". We may not think that its anything that special. but when you really think about it, most of you have walked or driven past a McDonald's sometime in your life and played that song in your head. You may even catch yourself singing along to it at the end of one of their commercials. It helps you to think of their restaurant more often and in a different way, which may want you to go their more often. Similar things happen everyday to. You may just see a brand and sing their jingle out loud. This happened to me the other day for example. I was walking down the ice cream section of the grocery store with my friend. I saw Klondike bars and sang their slogan out loud. I hadn't even realized I had done this until my friend asked why I had just sang this song. This just shows how impactful a slogan can be for a company. A lot of times you will be singing or saying them without even knowing just because they can be so catchy. This is why slogans have become such a huge advertising technique.
    Another thing they do with these slogans is use them to send a specific message. A couple of examples are KFC or Subway. In KFC they say, "Its Finger Licking Good". This helps you to associate their chicken, with chicken that is good enough to want every last part of it to the point where you are licking it off your fingers. It makes you think that their chicken is the best chicken and could really could be this good. This same technique applies to Subway. Their slogan is, "Eat Fresh". Because of this it makes you think that eating at subway is eating good, quality, fresh food. And just the words fresh associated with food also helps their cause. Because of all these techniques involved in slogan making, it makes them extremely effective. This ultimately makes the use of slogans in advertising one of the most useful tools in the world of advertising.

Anti-smoking Advertisement Techniques

      In this advertisement they are trying to give the message of just how bad cigarettes are. In this advertisement they don't have to use words. They show a cigarette that seems perfect until it slowly shows that it is being burnt out. And it shows the end turning to ashes and has them floating around the picture. But the part that is trying to tell you not to smoke is the ashes. These ashes make up a man and this man has his head down and is reaching out as if asking for help. But for him he cant be helped because you can see that the ashes are floating away and he is falling apart. This shows a few messages. For one it shows how his life has been so taken over by cigarettes that he has basically become their ashes. And when his head is down it not only shows how sick he is but how regretful he is. He is also reaching out for help. On top of this he is slowly falling apart and becoming nothing but ash floating around on the screen. This shows that now that he is finally trying to seek help it is to late for him because the harm cigarettes do has finally ruined his life. Even though this advertisement is simple and wordless it is able to display a very strong message through one cigarette, which shows just how powerful advertising can be.

Heinz Advertising Techniques

      In this advertisement technique you can see there are many different ways they try too grab your attention. They are trying to make you think that their ketchup is the best out there. One way they do this is by their wording. In this add they say, "no one grows ketchup like Heinz". They avoid using words like make, and instead use grow to make it seem even more fresh. When you here the word grow in this situation you picture, instead of a factory made bottle, the fresh tomatoes being grown and made fresh into a bottle of ketchup. If they used a word like made instead you would just think of any other bottle of ketchup being made in a factory with any other old tomato. This also help to set them apart from just any other product as well. Another thing they do is connect what they are saying to the picture in the advertisement. From far away it may seem like its just a bottle of ketchup. But really its a bunch of tomatoes stacked together with the logo on it. And instead of the ketchup bottle cap it uses the stem of the tomato. These tomatoes are some of the best looking tomatoes as well. They have a perfect shine and are stacked in a way so that you can see the freshness of it on the inside. And both the tomatoes and the background are a perfect shade of red. Their objective of this advertisement is to not only make it memorable, but to also always have you think of a fresh bottle of ketchup when you hear the word, Heinz.

George Orwell's Response

    In the article written by George Orwell, "Politics and English Language" he objects to 'ready-made phrases" and "mixed metaphors". The reason he objects to these ready-made phrases is because when you use repeated phrases they aren't your own ideas. When you are using phrases someone has already made you aren't using it to fit your writing. Your just substituting something that seems to fit. Also, when you use something that is repeated off someone else, you don't process the full meaning. You become distant from what you are actually saying and it loses that meaning. It starts to become something you just say but don't actually process, which then causes it to have very little significance to you and to others. And when using mixed metaphors he believes it is best to avoid them. He believes that when it comes to metaphors people use them in the wrong way. He thinks that they have lost all their meaning and power because people use them when they don't want to make phrases themselves. This connects with his opinions on the ready-made phrases because that is basically what they are. They are phrases that people have made to put power and emphasis into their writing but, they wind up being used by people who don't comprehend their full meaning and use them to fill in space. So when they are used by people who don't understand them, just like ready-made phrases, they begin to lose their significance and their true meaning.

Politics and the English Language

Different Media Sources on the Same Topic

    When looking at two different sources of the same topic I was surprised in the differences between the two. I chose the topic of the tweet trump had sent out on Muslim immigrant violence. I read coverage on it from CNN and Fox News. The article CNN came out with got straight to the point and titled it, 'Trump Tweets Anti-Muslim Videos". While Fox News was very vague about the title and never really said what it was about. They titled the article "McMaster Speaks to Trump's Tweets". You can see how they never really addressed the exact topic of the article. When you read the two articles you can see huge differences as well. For one when you are reading CNN's it talks from the point of view of both sides. It shares opinions and things that people have said in both support of the tweet and against the tweet. It also digs deeper into how outraged many people were and why. In this it covers more and from both sides. While in Fox News it never really describes the other point of view. The whole time McMaster talks in trumps defense and why he was right to post this video. Except he never really gives a valid reason to why trump was justified to post this video. They also very briefly talked  about the opposing side of this situation, but shot it down pretty quickly. When reading these two articles you could also see which side each article was on as well. McMaster talked the whole time of how important it was that Trump posted this and how he did it in the country's best interest. While CNN showed more of the outrage it sparked. When reading these two articles you can clearly see the separation within media. Even though both news sources wrote about the same topic, each side had very different opinions and made you think in very different ways about each. This just shows how even on the same topic, the news is able to completely change your perspective on the issue by its use of wording and the way it presents the issue.

CNN's Article
Fox News Article