Truth in Advertising

This week our MAGIC Comenius team continued working on the second project theme which is advertising.

So today, among preparing our online comic book and getting ready to promote our project, we looked at how we read and identify various types of advertisements, how we analyze them for examples of persuasive writing such as generalizing, exaggeration, and scare tactics and write responses to ads that we’ve analyzed. In other words, we looked at truth in advertising.


We all know that ads are everywhere and that they’re trying to sell us something - a person, a thing or even an idea. So we tried to read ads carefully to find out how they are trying to shape our thinking.

We used the www.tv411.org activities to help us understand the topic. Two interesting posters from this website we commented are shown below:

As we know ads use certain kinds of persuasive writing tactics, or techniques, to convince us to do something or take an action. So some of them will try to generalize, scare and/or exaggerate.

We also watched a video about hidden costs. Students published on their blogs TV ads we all commented. Students uploaded on the MAGIC 2 blog some interesting ads to discuss. Based on the activities and the following discussion we started working in groups on how to develop our own ads, either on print or in video format.

We would like to thank all of our MAGIC Comenius students for their enthusiasm and collaboration and we are looking forward to our next meeting next week.

Cheers,

Theo Goutas