Campaign Rhetoric
Composition Project 1: Campaign Rhetoric 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, evaluate, and create an evidence-based argument about a campaign that interests you. Steps in the Process Like any authentic research project, you’ll begin with inquiry: What do I know? What don’t I know? You’ll use research to get to know some campaign(s) in the media around you: Web, TV, print, radio, mobile phone. Once you’ve done that research, you’ll 1. Choose a campaign: 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. Identify the rhetorical situation: the communicator, audience, message and purpose, context 3. Analyze its rhetorical strategies 4. Use this analysis to make an evaluative argument about this campaign Your Audience Your instructor and your peers are part of your audience. But the message you send with this analysis is likely to be of interest to audiences in and out of your field. Thus, it is up to you to decide who you want your audience to be, based on your purpose, message, and context.
Form Depending on your audience, purpose, message, and context, this composition may take any one or a hybrid of textual forms: e. g. , an opinion piece, a letter, a memo, a report, a blog. Research and Evidence: Your composition will draw on at least one form of primary research (see Praxis 200-205). ), and at least one form of scholarly research. Additionally, you may feel welcome to draw on other sources (journals, newspapers or magazines, Web sites, images, popular culture) as your audience, purpose, and message require.
