With one of its major focuses on both textual and visual rhetoric, English 102 invites you into an in-depth analysis of how text and image work together. In politics, product advertising, education, business, and many other contexts, we see words, pictures, and even sound coming together in campaigns to send messages to their audiences. Your increasingly sharp ability to analyze the rhetorical situations of such campaigns not only contributes to the strength of your communication, but it also helps to strengthen your ability to “read” and critique the world around you. This first project invites you to analyze and evaluate a campaign that interests you. In this project, here are important steps to take:
1. Choose a campaign. Use research to get to know some campaign(s) in the media around you: Web, TV, print, radio, mobile phone. An anti-drug campaign for teens? A local Senator’s campaign for re-election? Starbucks’s line of seasonal coffee drinks? A university’s recruiting campaign?
2. Examine the key elements of the rhetorical situation: the communicator, audience, message and purpose, context.
3. Analyze the rhetorical strategies the campaign is using to send its message.
4. Use this analysis to evaluate this campaign.
