EH 102
Visual Analysis
Due; June 20, 11:59 (USA Online/Canvas)
Length: 2 pages (approximately 650-800 words)
Value: 50 points
Assignment: Choose a print ad from a magazine or newspaper, a web or TV ad, or a political cartoon and analyze its visual rhetoric. Your paper must include a copy of the image or a link to the image.
Process: First, you should inquire into the ad’s rhetorical situation:
Text – the ad’s medium (newspaper, magazine, web, TV)
Writer – the company that makes the product; the ad agency that made the ad; the cartoonist
Opposing View – competing products, competing points of view
Audience – the consumer demographic toward which the ad is aimed; the political ideology toward which it is aimed
Constraints – the audience’s beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, interests and habits that influence their perceptions of the ad, product, or political position
Exigencies – is there controversy here? If so, how is it used?
Context – what other media manifestations exist around the ad or cartoon (newspaper stories, web pages, TV shows)?
Rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos
Second, identify and analyze the claim image makes, the evidence it provides for its claim, and the warrants or assumptions it assumes its audience will accept. Analyze its emotional appeals: does it try to make its audience happy, angry, concerned, frightened?
General Outline
Introduction: Introduce the ad and indicate that you will be analyzing its visual rhetoric.
Narrative:
describe the image and its rhetorical situation and context in detail. Your description should take particular note of colors, shapes, motion, proportions, and sound or text (if the image uses it).
Identify the (consumer) commonplace arguments (beyond “buy this product”) the ad employs.
Thesis: indicate that you will be analyzing the ad (taking it apart and examining its parts) in terms of its efforts to persuade an audience to do, or believe something.
Body: Examine how the image’s contextual and compositional elements contribute to its effort to persuade its audience.
Conclusion: Evaluate the image’s overall effectiveness and the effectiveness of particular aspects of its visual rhetoric.
Assessment: Your essay will be evaluated based on the Shared Criteria for Evaluating Writing, which can be found in Section 5 of The Little Penguin Handbook with Resources for Composition at the University of South Alabama.
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