Visual Rhetorical Anaylsis

Statement of Purpose

Purpose: I am writing a rhetorical analysis on the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats website because I feel that it has everything I am looking for in regards to the analysis of ethos, pathos, and logos of the pictures and text. I think the website is fun and colorful and I like to eat shredded mini wheat. I hope that after my audience reads my essay they will have a good understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos and will know how it applied in the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats website. I wanted to communicate this website to other because I did a paper and presentation about a Strawberry Mini Wheats ad last year in College Writing 1 and I won a contest for it. I know Kellogg’s ads are full of rhetorical devices so I knew I could do a very good essay on their website. The best possible outcome of my essay would be that my audience would be well aware of the rhetorical devices and agree with my ideas on the Frosted Mini Wheats website. The worst possible outcome would be that people would not understand what ethos, pathos, and logos are so they would not understand anything from the analysis. To make the outcome of the paper positive, I need to make sure to elaborate what ethos, pathos, and logos means in my introduction to help my audience understand the analysis.

Audience: My audience for my essay should be about college-aged students. They should have at least a year of English in college and should be interested in the topic. I think my audience should also like to eat Frosted Mini Wheats so that they will be interested in my topic. Lewis sells Frosted Mini Wheats at every food court and store so Lewis students would be a good audience for me. I also think my students should be around college age because many college students eat cereal for breakfast when they are in a rush. I think college students would be able to relate to my topic.

Context: For my time of communication, I feel that I should have my audience read my essay in the morning. My audience may have had breakfast already or may not have eaten at all. Food always draws in people attention and especially if they are hungry. The place of communication should be in a classroom. My essay is a proper rhetorical analysis that is very educational. Being in the classroom my audience will have the state of mind that they are learning so they can fully grasp my argument and its parts. The time and place really shape the expectations of the audience. If I had my audience read my essay at a different time or place they may not think about my argument or they may just not read it at all. My time and place makes the audience really think about the topic and understand my argument.

Design Plan

Strategy: For my strategy, I plan to use an essay to bring forth my argument. I plan to add pictures from the website of the “Minis”characters and snapshots from the site to help my audience to visualize what I am explaining. I will also state the parts of the website and stay what they have to do with the rhetorical analysis.

Ethos: I will make my paper very proper and similar to an analysis one would find in a textbook. This will help my audience understand that I know what I will be talking about. I want to sound very professional when the audience reads my paper.

Pathos: I am adding in the pictures from the website that I feel are appealing to the emotions. I think the “Minis” characters they use for advertisement are cute so I plan on incorporating them into my text.

Logos: I will be very descriptive and give many facts from the website to explain my argument. Adding in lots of facts will help make my work more credible and will help the audience understand better.

Medium: For my medium, I plan to present my paper in essay form. I am going to add the pictures from the website to help with my argument. I plan to make my paper in MLA format but I am going to use Calisto MT font because I think it looks more proper than Times New Roman. My font will also be in black and 12 font with a double space. The audience will feel less overwhelmed by the long text if it is in double space. I feel this will give the best possible outcome for my argument of my rhetorical analysis of the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats website.

Arrangement: For the arrangement, I am going to make my essay in proper MLA format. I will start with my introduction and then body paragraphs and I will then have my conclusion but I will not title each section of the paper. I am going to have my pictures on the right side of the page so the audience can read the text first and then analyze the photos. I feel this will help my audience get my topic and to be able to link the pictures with my analysis. I will have a Work Cited page after my essay stating all of my sources. My arrangement is very generic and typical for an educational essay so my audience will read the text and understand because they are used to writing papers in the similar format.

 

Reflection

When comparing my design plan and purpose statement and my final paper I feel that I have done exactly what I wanted to do. My pre-writing reflects exactly what I did in my paper. I feel that I did a good job really analyzing the website and searching for as many rhetoric examples in the images and text as possible. I did my font in 11 point instead of 12 point because when I reviewed the paper, the text looked too large and awkward in the paper. I also used images I found on Google instead of using the images on the website because I was unable to copy the images. I was able to find pictures similar to the website so it all worked out well.

My photo essay was a lot different from my rhetorical analysis paper. The photo essay had a lot less text and more focus on the images while the rhetorical analysis was the opposite. Although, images were very important in both papers, the rhetorical analysis focuses on the text too. The photo essay was more of a narrative type of paper; it told a story the abuse some farm animals have to endure. The rhetorical analysis was more of an educational essay that searched deep in the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats website to discover how the author used ethos, pathos, and logos to convince people to buy their product. The photo essay also was in APA format and the rhetorical analysis was in MLA format. I think the rhetorical analysis was MLA because it makes the paper proper and well organized so the reader can follow my work. The audience was also different for the two papers. My audience for the photo essay was any person at consuming age. My audience for the rhetorical analysis was college-aged students. This made my writing style change because people in college understand what I am analyzing and consuming-aged people may need things simplified because they may not have been in school for a long time. Overall, I think I did a good job on both papers and I am proud to show off my work.

Revisions

For this paper, I made sure to fix my “Works Cited” title by making it the same text size and color as the rest of the paper. I also unified the font for all my pictures captions and fixed grammatical errors.