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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Rhetorically Analyze This

It's not a favorite assignment of mine, but I know many teachers who ask students to perform a rhetorical analysis of a commercial.

Something like this:
Name the speaker, the purpose, and the intended audience; then describe how the message was crafted to achieve the purpose. It helps students understand what rhetoric is, and that's a good thing.

The results students produce, however, are often boring:
  • The ad shows us attractive cool people using the product, and the intended audience wants to be cool and attractive...
  • The ad presents a logical argument on price and value...
  • The ad makes us feel afraid of what might happen if we don't buy the product...
But these results are not boring because, as some might assume, students are boring.

Commercials are boring.

I don't ask students to write up rhetorical analyses of commercials because the most visible marketing campaigns often rely on easy rhetorical appeals - making for easy (read boring) papers.

What if, however, our students had to pick marketing material like this?

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