Outline and critically discuss the concept of texts having a 'preferred reading'. Illustrate with examples from different media some of the ways in which you infer preferred readings.

Guidance

For general guidance about what is expected in your essays for this module, see the general criteria.

What Key Features Do I Look For? Familiarity with relevant texts Evidence - the stronger the better Argument - coherent and balanced Theoretical discussion - relation to relevant theories Understanding of relevant concepts Reflexivity - reflections on methodology Examples - insightfully analysed Style - readability and effective presentation

Please remember to avoid footnotes and to include an alphabetical list of 'References' which have been cited in the text (not a Bibliography of anything you have read for the essay). This list should include author's names, date, book titles (in italics), place of publication and publisher. Within the text always cite author's surname, date and page number. Double-space your text and number your pages. For more detailed notes on writing essays in this department, click here.

Advice for this particular assignment: The concept of the 'preferred reading' was originated by the British sociologist Stuart Hall. The term refers to the way in which a message was intended to be interpreted. Identifying the author's intent had long been controversial in literary texts (literary theorists having identified what they called 'the intentional fallacy' of judging a literary work by its author's intentions). However, few would disagree with 'the communicative presumption' whereby we assume that the authors of any text must at least have intended to communicate something. In order even to understand a text we need to make some reasonable assumptions about which ways of reading it make more sense than others: 'Stop Children' as the text on a traffic crossing warden's sign is far more likely (from our social knowledge of the context) to mean 'Drivers must stop here and now because children are crossing!' than to mean 'Stop children by using contraceptives!'. Stuart Hall's primary concern as a sociologist was not so much about whether we comprehended a text but more about whether or not we agreed with the propositions, standpoint or values it represented. Such 'weighing up' of a message would be more relevant for bystanders in relation to a protester's sign outside a Family Planning clinic that read 'Stop Abortions!'. However, this distinction raises another issue about whether or how far comprehension and interpretation can be treated as separate processes (some theorists argue that even basic perception is already unavoidably coloured by values - as for instance, when we see only what we want to see).

It is essential to consider how you infer a preferred reading. On what data and hypotheses do you draw? On what textual and social knowledge? How does context help? In what ways do you draw on previous experience with similar texts? Illustrate these processes in detail in relation to specific examples. Do not rely solely on your own judgement - check how far others agree with you. Shaun Moores asks about the 'preferred reading', 'Where is it and how do we know if we've found it? Can we be sure we didn't put it there ourselves while we were looking? And can it be found by examining any sort of text?' (Moores 1993, 28). Stuart Hall was focusing on 'preferred readings' in the context of mass communication rather than interpersonal communication, and within the mass media some theorists feel that the concept may be applied more easily to news and current affairs than to other mass media genres. David Morley wondered whether it might be the 'reading which the analyst is predicting that most members of the audience will produce' (Morley 1981, 6). John Corner argues that it is not easy to find actual examples of media texts in which one reading is preferred within a plurality of possible readings (Corner 1983, 279). As Justin Wren-Lewis comments, 'the fact that many decoders will come up with the same reading does not make that meaning an essential part of the text' (Wren-Lewis 1983, 184). And Kathy Myers notes, in the spirit of a post-structuralist social semiotics, that 'it can be misleading to search for the determinations of a preferred reading solely within the form and structure' of the text (Myers 1983, 216).

Consider Robert Goldman's argument that 'more than any other mass media form, ads are shaped to accomplish preferred interpretations' (Goldman 1992, p. 80). Roland Barthes (1977, 38ff) argued that visual texts are inherently polysemic- they need linguistic 'anchors' to try to make readers at least aware of what later came to be known as the 'preferred reading'. Upmarket contemporary ads, however, tend to be more subtle and flatter the consumer by not explicitly offering much by way of verbalised claims. This illustrates the use of shared textual and social codes. Myers adds that:

There is a danger in the analysis of advertising of assuming that it is in the interests of advertisers to create one 'preferred' reading of the advertisement's message. Intentionality suggests conscious manipulation and organization of texts and images, and implies that the visual, technical and linguistic strategies work together to secure one preferred reading of an advertisement to the exclusion of others... The openness of connotative codes may mean that we have to replace the notion of 'preferred reading' with another which admits a range of possible alternatives open to the audience. (Myers 1983, 214-16)