Teaching Rhetorical Analysis with On-Campus Student Advertising

In my introductory composition class, we are beginning our lesson on graphic novels for improving visual analytical skills.  While gathering some research at the library, I walked through the psychology building on campus and found some of these advertisements.  For today’s class, I’m looking at the effectiveness of terse, often informal or esoteric messages to get viewer’s attention. 

The advertising campaign for upcoming March 5 protests at Albany is effective because of its thematic form:  a faded image superimposed with a catchy, terse, and sometimes snarky response and the Twitter hashtag “M5.” 

These images play on readers, likely from a younger audience that is more aware of contemporary online popular culture—the Bill O’Reilly “Can’t Explain That” meme, the colloquial use of the word “curr” substituting for “care,” and even a reference to that loveable creature of the sea, the manatee, as a pun for the underfunded humanities departments. 

Questions I will be asking my students concern the effectiveness of these short statements that develop from another flyer that provides more detail about the protests, and how that longer advertisement relies on using a larger font to emphasize the heading “FREE PROTEST.”  And even that phrase mocks one of the conventions of advertising, getting your attention by offering something for no cost—but in this case, turning a protest into a saleable object that not many shoppers are looking for when sauntering through a Target. 

I did remove one advertisement from this post that included bluer language than the already eye-catching comment, “Shit’s fucked up and shit”—which at least is humorous by appealing to such informal language about such an important topic as underfunded education and high tuition costs, as well as the statement’s self-aware humor that its sentence structure is circular. 

I also include some more heartwarming ads.   

One relies on popular culture through Neil Patrick Harris’s character Barney Stinson for advertising an on-campus future lawyers organization (but with the “Lawyr’d” remark, shouldn’t it be Jason Segel’s character advertising that group?). 
 

 And the other poster from the English department uses a monochromatic design that produces a high contrast so that the short statement—“You remember your first grade teacher’s name.  Who will remember yours?”—to allow its reader to be nostalgic over what was hopefully a happy elementary school education, and calling out that reader’s sense of ethics and pride to do something more with his or her life.