Course Description

Just do it. Never had it, never will. Be all that you can be. Because I'm worth it. Whatz up? Probably at least one of these slogans is familiar to you, a fact that isn't surprising considering that, as cultural critic Robert Twitchell points out, the average American adult is exposed to almost 3,000 advertisements a day. We live surrounded by what he calls Adcult - an advertising culture that constantly is bombarding us with messages urging us to go out and buy buy buy. Many of us consider these endless commercials simply to be "noise" that we somehow need to filter out of our lives: so what makes them interesting for a class on writing and rhetoric? The fact is that the average ad represents one of the most compact and powerful forms of argument: the overriding mission of each ad, after all, is persuasion. In "The Rhetoric of Advertising," we will examine the rhetorical strategies deployed in contemporary ads as a way of exploring the different ways in which an argument can be constructed. In analyzing the written, audible, and visual copy of advertisements, we will address a variety of issues such as how audience and purpose influence the form of an argument; the nature and function of different modes of argument (emotional appeals, ethical arguments, arguments based on character or logic); and, the relative effectiveness of different strategies of development. We will "read" a variety of advertisements, from ads for Apple Computers, Volkswagen bugs, and Miracle bras to public service and political ads for Ebonics and the Armed Forces. In addition, we also will read a selection of secondary materials - articles by critics as varied as Mark Crispin Miller and Gloria Steinem - that will provide us with different models of analyzing these types of texts. As writers, you will work on refining your own persuasive strategies, moving from analyzing the individual ad of your choice to a more source-based contextual argument about a particular ad or series of ads. Throughout the course, we will be thinking about persuasion and rhetoric in broad terms, looking at the ways in which visual, oral, and written modes of discourse can collaborate to produce an effective argument.

Go to SECTION 6 homepage

Go to SECTION 10 homepage