Monday, December 2, 2013

Katakana Literary Work (Final)

[Link]

Since I made an advertisement for a stereo component, I used katakana mainly to push a "cutting edge" or "modern" image.  Since being up-to-date is important in electronics/appliances/etc, anything that will make the reader believe that you are modern is probably helpful, even if it has only a very minimal effect.  It was easy to include katakana in this advertisement because so many music-related words exist in Japanese as loan words, even when there's an equivalent native Japanese word.  Sound effects are also music-related and are written in katakana - though I wasn't really sure how to write a musical sound since the only examples of written sound effects I can think of are the ones we went over in class, so I just guessed.
Since my advertisement is a couple sentences rather than standout words or phrases, I was cautious about using katakana to write words which are normally written in hiragana or kanji even though some of the advertisements people used as examples did this as an eye-catching measure.  I thought it might look strange in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph, and would be more distracting than eye-catching.  Instead I decided to use loan words over their native equivalents (ミュージック instead of 音楽 for instance) because I thought it might look more natural.  I'm not sure if the other route would have been better, though!