Description
Rhetoric = is interested in what something does, the relationship between design and effect.
So far, we have thought about how we can experience rhetoric or persuasion in nearly everything we do. Seemingly, the entire social world is designed to create some sort of effect.
As we move forward, we continue to think about how we can build a vocabulary to describe the relationship between design and effect more precisely.
One way to speak precisely about the rhetorical situation is to consider the situation in which it occurs. Accordingly, we can use three terms to break up the situation: ]
Audience: At whom communication is directed, for whom it is made.
Purpose: What communication is trying to get done, its goal.
Strategy: The design choices made so that the purpose might be achieved in light of the audience.
We can then perhaps think about the rhetorical situation using an oversimplified formula:
Audience + Purpose = Strategy
We can perhaps, then, think about rhetorical situations as an equation: Audience + Purpose = Strategy. That is, once we know who our audience is and what our purpose is we can begin to develop what we might think to be effective in a situation.
With that in mind, please consider the following writing task:
Choose three rhetorical texts. These texts can be anything as long as they strike you as clearly rhetorical, that is, they seem to be clearly trying to generate an effect on the viewer. Also consider that since you’ll be writing about each of these texts individually that you choose something on the shorter side. It can be anything though: an image, a meme, a tweet, a video, an article, an ad, etc.
Include in your canvas post either the text itself or a link to text.
Under each text, describe briefly whom you take to be the intended audience of text and the intended purpose.
Then, for a much longer section of writing for each text, describe the strategy. What are the choices being made here in light of the audience and purpose? How are these choices adding up to an overall strategy?
Bullet points 2-4 should be repeated for three different texts, and your writing does not have to connect between texts.
Format
approx. 250 words per text for approx. 750 words all together.
