Over and over again the Board's examiner stresses the need to use the appropriate technical terminology. We must therefore get out of the habit of putting the analysis in our own words and must always try to use the appropriate terminology demanded by the text. Yes, media speak can empower!
Take for example the area of formal codes of construction two words are important here: codes and construction.
Codes clearly can be decoded.
Constructions similarly can be deconstructed.
You should therefore know your primary and secondary codes.
When speaking, for example, about codes of dress, it is useful to speak of choices made from various paradigms, thus from a paradigm of neck ties a person might choose a black tie, from the paradigm of shirts he might choose white, from the paradigm of jackets he might choose a dark charcoal jacket, from the paradigm of shoes he would choose black. Eventually if he makes the correct choices from these various paradigms he'll be able to go to the funeral and will not break any conventional dress codes.
Rules about codes are often there to be broken.
Punx are very naughty 'cos they break dress codes and conventions, safety pins indeed! dog collars! chains! green hair! yawn,z z z zZ Z Z Z. Nupunx (naughty uncoventional speelin) are, in fact,,just as conforming and rule bound within their tribe as the rest of us in mainstream society.
In the Victorian period for a man suitably attired in black to make the grievous error of wearing brown shoes was very serious, shocking, shaming even.
The word connotation should appear regularly in your analysis, you can also use the words suggests or hints at; for example:
" the fact the that there is a red rose on the coffee table might connote ideas of romantic love or passion".
Or you might say that, "perhaps the red rose on the coffee table suggests love or romance"
.You might even say that the red rose is a signifier of "romance". Were you to notice a worm or a blight on the rose then there would be a whole semiotic case to make as William Blake does in his poem "The Sick Rose".
Media studies students tend to proceed on the premise that nothing is in the frame accidentally; they believe rather that everything is carefully and purposefully constructed; each item being placed there carefully, their purpose being to construct meaning.
The well worn phrase, "you're reading too much into this" was coined by a reluctant Media Studies student who suffered from severe failure of the imagination.
Reading is the key word e.g.
I read the red rose as a pitiful male attempt to suggest the possibility of the existence of gentler male feelings as part of some unsubtle seduction strategy.
The café scene in "Sliding Doors" for example reversed the meaning of the gift of flowers i.e. men who give girls flowers are lying cheats who must not be trusted ever.
Sometimes what is not there is even more important than what is, for example, a wedding scene where all the appropriate codes are in place with the exception of the body language code of the groom i.e. he is signing very unhappy indeed when he should be doing the exact reverse.
In a highly conventional social performance like a wedding the organisers must try to have all the codes perfectly in place.
It is the tension about observing the codes correctly that makes best man's failure to offer the ring a comic or tragic moment. The film "Four weddings and a Funeral" makes great play with the multiplicity of codes and conventions surrounding weddings.
Let's use the discourse appropriate to our discipline and you will find yourself increasingly confident and in control as media analysts.
