This title combines a number of different academic approaches in order to better understand the complex nature of readers' everyday encounters with their books.

Engagingly written by a well-known author team, Reading Popular Culture is a clear, graceful, authoritative, brief rhetoric focused on academic writing. Students can turn to this book for guidance about matters large and smallùchoosing a topic, writing an analysis, constructing a paragraph, using and documenting sources, punctuating a quotation, and much more. Reading Popular Culture covers the writing process from beginning to end, including drafting, revising, editing, and preparing final copy. Students will learn essential skills for effective college writingùskills they will need not only for first-year writing courses but for responding to any college-level writing assignment.

The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."

Textbook

Reading Pop Culture: A Portable Anthology is a current, compact, inexpensive collection that taps into students' passionate engagement with popular culture in order to help them to become better writers. Its focus on themes of consumption, advertising, identity, technology, television, movies, and new media prompts composition students to think and write about issues they care about. This volume in the popular Bedford/St. Martin's series of Portable Anthologies and Guides offers a trademark combination of high quality and great value. -- Provided by publisher.

Re-reading Popular Culture is an entertaining investigationof the meanings and value of popular culture today. It explores thetheme of cultural citizenship by combining textual analysis andmedia reception theory to analyze popular culture. Includes such contemporary issues as the rewriting ofmasculinity after the success of feminism, and the layers ofmeaning in semi-public and private talk of multiculturalism andethnicity Traces its topics across a variety of media forms and texts,including sports; detective fiction and police series; andchildren’s television and games Clearly and accessibly written for the student, scholar, andgeneral reader.

Exploring poetry scrapbooks, old-time radio show recordings, advertising verse, corporate archives, and Hallmark greeting cards, among other unconventional sources, Mike Chasar casts American poetry as an everyday phenomenon consumed and created by a vast range of readers. He shows how American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century and its reception helped set the stage for the dynamics of popular culture and mass media today. Poetry was then part and parcel of American popular culture, spreading rapidly as the consumer economy expanded and companies exploited its profit-making potential. Poetry also offered ordinary Americans creative, emotional, political, and intellectual modes of expression, whether through scrapbooking, participation in radio programs, or poetry contests. Reenvisioning the uses of twentieth-century poetry, Chasar provides a richer understanding of the innovations of modernist and avant-garde poets and the American reading public's sophisticated powers of feeling and perception.

A provocative collection of articles that begins with the idea that the "popular" in classrooms and in the everyday lives of teachers and students is fundamentally political. This anthology includes articles by elementary and secondary public school teachers, scholars and activists who examine how and what popular toys, books, films, music and other media "teach." The essays offer strong critiques and practical pedagogical strategies for educators at every level to engage with the popular.

A reader on popular culture