A prolific painter of portraits before and after the French Revolution ...

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Chapter 7
explaining
7. Use your explaining skills to analyze visual images. For example, the work of
art that opens this chapter is Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s 1788 portrait of
Marie Antoinette and her Children. Use your browser to search for information
about Marie Antoinette, her role in the French Revolution, and the
career of Vigée-Lebrun. Then study the photograph on the previous page of
a migrant woman and her children, taken in California in 1936. Do some
Internet research on Dorothea Lange and her series of photographs of migrant
workers in California. Write an essay comparing and contrasting the
artists (Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Dorothea Lange), the composition of
these two images, and/or the social/cultural conditions surrounding each
image. Assume that your audience is a group of your peers in your composition
class.
PROFESSIONAL WRITING
Miss Clairol’s “Does She . . .
Or Doesn’t She?”:
How to Advertise a
Dangerous Product
James B. Twitchell
A longtime professor of English at the University of Florida, James B. Twitchell
has written a dozen books on a variety of academic and cultural topics. His recent
books on advertising and popular culture include Carnival Culture: The
Trashing of Taste in America (1992), Adcult USA: The Triumph of Advertising
in American Culture (1996), and Living It Up: Our Love Affair
with Luxury (2002). In “Miss Clairol’s ‘Does She ...Or Doesn’t She?’ ” taken
from Twenty Ads That Shook the World (2000), Twitchell examines the Miss
Clairol advertising campaign, which was designed by Shirley Polykoff. Twitchell
explains how Polykoff ’s ads, which ran for nearly twenty years, revolutionized
the hair-coloring industry. Part of the success of the ad was in the catchy title,
Twitchell notes, but equally important were the children in the ads and the followup
phrase, “Hair color so natural, only her hairdresser knows for sure.” (Before you
read Twitchell’s essay, however, look at several of Polykoff ’s Clairol ads by searching
Shirley Polykoff on Google.)
PROFESSIONAL COPY—NOT FOR RESALE
1