Grammar & Style
This punctuation mark is used between independent clauses that are not joined by a coordinating conjunction.
What is a semicolon?
When preparing for a class discussion, you should avoid this format of question.
What are yes/no questions?
You should do this on your first pass of a text to get a mental map before diving deep.
What is skim it?
The compositional guideline that divides an image into a [_x_] grid to help place subjects and create tension.
What is the rule of thirds?
The country and folklore tradition where the original concept of the zombie was born IN AMERICA.
What is Haiti (or Haitian Vodou)?
I will also accept: what is Africa, due to the transatlantic slave trade?
Joining two independent clauses with only a [x] creates this specific type of run-on error.
What is a comma splice?
Verbs like "says," "shows," and "tells" are considered weak summary verbs. We replace these with...
What are verbs like "critique" and "imply"?
The theory of the visceral, physical reaction your body has to media or stimuli before your brain even processes the emotion, shifting attention from what a story means to what it does.
What is affect theory?
Background sounds (like wind, traffic, or crickets) that establish the setting without drawing attention to themselves.
What is ambient noise?
Julia Kristeva's critical term for the horror+disgust we humans feel/react when the boundary between the living self and the dead object breaks down (like when looking at a corpse). We feel this toward things that disrupt the clean boundaries between the self and the other, or the subject and the object.
What is abjection? From Powers of Horror. This refers to things that are neither subject nor object, but exist in a liminal or borderline space. Examples include bodily wastes (feces, vomit, menstrual blood), corpses, or open wounds that remind us of our fragile corporeal reality. Kristeva argues that the abject is not just uncleanliness, but anything that disturbs identity, system, and cultural order. To form a stable, independent ego, an individual must violently expel or reject that which threatens their sense of a clean boundary. The primal site of this is often the maternal body, where the infant must separate from the mother to enter the social or symbolic order.
Starting sentences with "it is" or "there are" creates this kind of phrasing, which makes sentences complex and inactive.
What is empty phrasing?
Writers use hedging words like "perhaps," "might," and "seems" to do this.
What is leave room for doubt?
The term for how overlapping social identities (like race, class, and gender) create unique modes of discrimination and privilege. Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.
What is intersectionality? Crenshaw visualized roads as separate systems of power (such as racism and sexism) and the traffic as institutional policies. A Black woman standing where the roads cross faces danger from multiple directions at once, yet standard legal protections often address only one road at a time.
The specific area of a visual frame where the viewer's eye is naturally drawn.
[think about foreground, background, middleground]
What is the focal point?
PT 1: Donna Haraway's famous 1985 essay is titled "A Manifesto" for this type of entity: a theoretical being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. This theory famously breaks down the boundary between the human and the machine, as well as the boundary between the human and animal.
PT 2: ESPECIALLY during America's shift from capitalism to late stage capitalism...
What is the cyborg? Haraway uses the figure of the cyborg to challenge rigid cultural boundaries and rethink socialist-feminist politics. A hybrid of machine and organism that blurs the lines between nature and culture, and physical and non-physical. Defies traditional Western dualisms, such as self and other, male and female.
Capitalism: An economic system where trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. Late Stage: The historical stage of our current economy, characterized by gig labor, hyper-consumerism, and the commodification of everyday life.
This word is forever banned and should never be used to describe a text.
What is "interesting"?
Writers use boosting words like "clearly," "absolutely," and "without a doubt" to do this.
What is close off dialogue?
The philosophical concept that humanity is not the center of the universe or the final, perfect stage of evolution. Not only that, this concept also argues that these human markers are not fixed biological truths but rather social, performative constructs.
What is posthumanism? Identity & gender...
The musical accompaniment in a film or game that dictates how the audience is supposed to feel in a given moment.
What is the score (or soundtrack)?
Name the time period and motivations for the first Two Waves of feminism.
What is: First Wave (1850s-1820s) - primarily focused on securing the right to vote (suffrage)?
Second Wave - broadened the debate to the workplace, sexuality, family, and reproductive rights in the 1960s and 70s?
When analyzing a text, you must work in this specific order to show how the writer achieves their purpose from beginning to end.
What is chronologically?
Tell us the difference between: diction, syntax, and tone.
Tone: What is the writer's attitude or feeling about a subject, created by their diction and syntax?
Diction: What is the words the writer chooses to convey a particular meaning?
Syntax: What is the way words are arranged within sentences?
The social system where men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership and moral authority, leading to phallogocentrism.
What is the patriarchy? Phallogocentrism: The dense critical theory term describing language, philosophy, and societal structures centered entirely around the masculine perspective.
Name as many deliberate uses of lighting and illumination in film/photography used to set moods or hide monsters.
What are natural light, key light, high key light, low key light, fill light, backlight, practical light, hard light, soft light, bounce light, chiaroscuro lighting, ambient light, motivated lighting?
The surveillance theory where a population behaves perfectly just because they *think* they are being watched by an unseen authority. Originally a conceptual design for a prison where a single guard in a central tower can watch all inmates, who never know if they are actually being observed.
What is the Panopticon? Coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault after discovering English philosopher Jeremy Bentham created the design in the late 18th century. Used the panopticon as a metaphor for modern society in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish. The concept applies to modern surveillance, digital data tracking, and self-censorship on social media.