Essay question

Using Keller's Brand Pyramid model (Figure 13.3, page 503), evaluate the brand character for a UK based high street fashion brandof your own choice* and use a piece of recent visual media advertising#for your chosen brand to discuss how the advertisementsupports the brand's equity. Word limit, 2000 words (plus or minus 10%), without bibliography or appendix; use Harvard style referencing, and reference and label any visual material included in the appendix.

* For example, consider using a brand for one of the companies such as: White Stuff Clothing, Fat Face,H&M, Cos, Zara, Arket, & other Stories or Next

# this should use the visual aspects of an advertisement published in the last three months, a copy of the visual element should be included in an appendix section of the essay.

Generic advice about essay writing for academic essays

You may be new to this type of assessment and if you are it is important to grasp the writing style that is needed. Tutors will want to give good grades but their hands are tied when the work fails to demonstrate important basic requirements. These notes, below, are intended to help avoid making basic mistakes and throwing marks away in the process.

Writing and referencing matter. Using the correct forms of writing and referencing will help you to gain full credit for your thinking and ideas. If you make mistakes, you could be throwing away marks needlessly.

To earn good marks, it is important to understand what is required before you start to read, plan and write, and developing an essay plan can provide a useful guide to help you structure the work and your reading. These notes, below, are intended to help.

The task.

One of the basic requirements expected of a graduate is a capacity to be able to express ideas clearly. A formal academic essay is an instrument for testing this. At the same time, an essay title will often be set to test the capacity for reflective thinking and logical deduction; usually, this capacity will develop as someone studies.

The capacity to apply a model can demonstrate logical deductive reasoning, and assessment of a model can show a capacity for reflective interpretation and critical scrutiny. In a university, we tend to call this ‘critical thinking'. Critical thinking is one of the main capabilities the world expects of a successful graduate so you need to demonstrate this for a good degree classification.

Study should help you learn to ask questions about the world, and about models developed to make sense of the world (including theories). Critical thinking can help you question things in a reasoned way. This should mean you can consider risks involved in taking something at face value, and that you can show the steps in your reasoning.

Housekeeping.

It is common for a significant number of essay scripts to fall short of the standards we expect for an academic essay. To produce work that does not follow appropriate conventions for academic work is to throw marks away. This may sound fussy, but it will disappoint employers if a graduate is not able to write with the correct style for different types of document.

When you have a confident mastery of academic style your grades will improve and so will your work rate, and your confidence is likely to grow. Even professional writers use proof-readers, so do not be ashamed to ask a friend to read your work, and to ask someone to suggest how to improve it.

When we have just written something, it can be hard to proof-read it ourselves; this is because we tend to ‘hear' what we were trying to say rather than ‘see' the way the story is revealed in the text. At the very least, try to finish your work well enough ahead of a deadline to come back to it with fresh eyes so you can see how to ‘tighten up' the prose.

• it is important that essay structure and writing style both conform to conventional academic standards; this helps markers to judge how well you match the normal literacy standard we expect, and it should assist you in expressing ideas with clarity (while ‘academic rules' such as presentation conventions are things we may not need to follow in other circumstances, it is important to demonstrate this sort of writing discipline when it is requested or risks failing to match learning outcomes being tested in an assessment)

• it is important to avoid the use of ‘unsupported assertions'; rephrase or avoid factual claims and statements that describe a state of affairs unless you can support these with references or else logical reasoning

• using first person pronouns (e.g.: I, me) should be avoided in a formal academic context (unless one is expressly told otherwise); using first person pronouns undermines the sense of objectivity that is part of a literary convention in most written academic modes of address

• references should be presented so they are traceable to the source; this includes presenting a bibliography in alphabetical order (a booklet to help with this is available in the School Office, and further guidance can be found online)

• the clarity and structure of an essay should aim to make it easy for the reader to follow the narrative train of thought and the character of any argument you are trying to present; different sections may need foundations so they build one on the other, and a clear introduction at the start should help to give signposts as to how these sections fit together

• each paragraph should aim to present a specific idea or point; for this, try to develop a key sentence at the heart of a paragraph (then other sentences in the same paragraph should cluster around this sentence to amplify and support the point that key sentence makes); try to make each sentence as short and clear as possible, so meaning is not lost in different clauses; start a new paragraph when you introduce a new idea

• give each diagram, figure, table or image a title, and reference the source (when this is appropriate)

• use sub-headings if you judge this helps to amplify the structure of your work

• only use footnotes in a short essay if you are sure they help, usually they are there to expand on points in the body of the essay and as a courtesy to a reader in case additional information may help understanding

• avoid long quotations, these are no substitute for your own words (usually quotations should be used sparingly, and to make points that are necessary to build a foundation for critical argument), you should try to include a page reference for a quotation too

• when you have multiple references in the text, put these in alphabetical order