Essay #2: Evaluating a Rhetorical Strategy

TASK: In this essay, you are going to analyze one advertising campaign. You are free to choose whatever campaign
you want, but you must clear your selection with me before you begin to write about it. You are free to analyze the
advertising surrounding a single product or a brand more generally. Once you have selected your product or brand,
you will have to gather a series of ads (5-10). It is best if you can find ads that have a significant historical range,
since this will allow you to analyze how the marketing strategy has evolved over time.

Using two articles from the course, write an essay in which you evaluate the rhetorical and advertising strategy
that is deployed in the ads that you select. Your goal in this paper is to get beyond the surface of the
image/commercial. Your goal is to reveal, through careful analysis of words and images, what the advertisement is
actually selling. Of course, the ad is selling the product. But, as we have noted in class, ads always sell more than
products: they sell a series of attitudes and beliefs. Your aim is to show what these attitudes are and how the ads
define them.

As we have discussed, advertisements always give visual formation to underlying assumptions about their culture.
Looking at ads that have historical range will allow you to assess how ideas about consumption or masculinity (to
take two examples) have changed. Although you are gathering a large sample size, you are not required to write
about all the ads you find. Instead, you should try to focus your attention on the ads that best exemplify the
argument you are trying make. Your collection of advertisements will allow you to speak with authority about the
brand/product and focusing your attention on a single ad or maybe two will allow you to demonstrate your ability
to close read a visual text.

APPROACH: The first step in this paper is to gather your images and commercials. In selecting them, you should
make sure that you chose ads that have interesting images or slogans to work with. The more interesting the ads,
the more interesting your paper will be. The paper should aim to show readers something they would not notice on
their own. If you are only pointing out what is apparent, the paper will not succeed.

The next step is to return to the course texts and figure out what concepts are useful for describing how the ads
make their appeal to the audience. In doing this, you want to look for the key terms that appeared in Luntz, Lutz,
and other writers we have examined. Take for example the notion of “weasel words.” Can this notion be used to
explain what is going on in the ads that you’ve selected? Does using this key term help you see something in the ad
that you might not have seen without it? (Go through the texts and ask these questions of each key phrase/idea
that you find.) Once you have gathered these conceptual tools, you can use them to analyze the ads with the aim
of revealing both what they are actually selling and how they are trying to sell it.

LENGTH: 1100-1300 words (about 4-5 pages), plus properly formatted Works Cited page. Essay must be in MLA
style: 1-inch margins, 12-point Times New Roman or Garamond, with a standard essay heading, page numbers in
a header at the top right and double spacing.