Sample

Outline of the RIP Project Rhetorical Situation

Audience: 18-24 year-olds who attend music festivals regularly; enough disposable income to support such attendance and other luxury purchases; personality type: heavy social media user, rave bum (lol), and naïve/prone to believing without questioning

Message: Stop trusting online appearances and question aggressively; also secondary message about caring about the social justice issue surrounding the labor exploitation underpinning the festival

Genre: Film review

Ethos: Veteran Film Critic P.T. Branham

Historical Context: 1/18/19

Cultural Context: Social Media Saturation, Festival circuit dominating disposable income of this age group,

RIP Project Draft

Just Stop Believing

If you believe this Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud, Billy McFarland is to blame. The promotion company is to blame. The social media influencers are to blame. Kendall Jenner in particular is to blame because she represents all that is bad and despicable and unforgivable about mindless American consumerism. Well maybe she’s not to blame how could she have known. But she’s for sure to blame for that Pepsi cringefest. So maybe strike two.

Billy McFarland, the founder and CEO of Fyre, is running this ship of fools according to the directors of this documentary, Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, who villainize him even in their lighting choice which he mocks under his breath. Billy is in fact so foolish that he literally becomes fixated on buying a pirate ship for the festival as a novelty piece even when there were still no bathrooms or lodging for guests. As the resident ring leader of the festival circus, Furst and Nason make sure Billy fits the role; he is characterized as a quick talking, slow witted, buffoonish scumbag who has no idea what he is doing.

But he is not the only fool. All the way down to the hapless guests, who themselves take on two-dimensional qualities as idiot targets who got what was coming to them, everyone comes across as absurdly dumb and equally unsympathetic. One festival goer dramatically bursts into tears when she sees the festival grounds for the first time. It is hard to feel sorry for anyone in this circus. Except the laborers who worked around the clock and got little screen time, even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard.

The documentary misses the entire point. Human nature is to blame more so than anything else, not a particular person; the entire disaster was a bizarre intersection among many players in a crooked game who were all mindlessly wanting more. Billy has always been “thinking big,” and the attendees wanted a big experience. Or rather it was not even a big experience, but a bigger one. Bigger than Coachella, or Rolling Loud, or EDC. Bigger than what their friends were doing. Bigger than what they had done last year.

The Fyre Festival documentary is aggressively finger pointing and mocking all the way through; the scam seems obvious in retrospect. But all great scams have a way of camouflaging themselves, and the directors should have explored the camouflage with less judgment and universalized it. The Fyre Festival is one of countless scams big and small that share a set of patterns.

By leaving the viewer in a confident position, laughing at everyone involved, the director has done nothing except hurt the viewer even more. By sitting in the audience laughing at and not identifying with anyone, they are even more vulnerable. Your ego is reinforced. That could never be me. Perhaps not; you may never pay exorbitant sums for a music event that goes up in smoke. But you will likely buy into an idea, a hope, a person, a job, or something that turns out to be less than what was promised in the advertisement. It is human nature to hope for the best, and sometimes, as they say, hope against hope.

Even when the writing is on the wall. Even when the jig is up, sometimes we just keep believing. Fyre Fraud provided no context for this tendency, and only worsened all of our ego ridden tendencies to assume that what happens to others will never happen to me.

Apparently Ja Rule is organizing Fyre Fest 2 right now- I heard it’s going to be amazing.

RIP Essay Body Paragraph Example: Pathos

Note the same RA Mechanics:

Yellow= TS Claim

Blue: Quote Integration

Purple= Analysis

Green= Internal Transition

Gray= Structure technique to improve rhetorical unity- key words in predictable sequence

In my Fyre Festival film review I used pathos by engaging my audience’s love and hate for a popular and divisive media figure, and I also created sympathy for the laborers to show them how the scam portrayed had more significant consequences such as labor exploitation than those associated with the disgruntled concert attendees. In my opening paragraph, I hyperbolically blamed Kendall Jenner for the Fyre fiasco, writing that “Kendall Jenner in particular is to blame because she represents all that is bad and despicable and unforgivable about mindless American consumerism.” I used the phrase “all that is bad and despicable” to effectively exaggerate to an absurd degree so that my audience would detect sarcasm and glean that such a position is absurd. Those in my audience who like, love, or even idolize this public figure would be alienated by a scathing critique of her. So by mocking an extreme critique of her and making it seem unreasonable, I am keeping them on my argumentative side, and ensuring they remain open to my message about the problematic nature of superficial appearances camouflaging more nefarious motives like greed. In contrast to appealing to the positive affection some of the audience has for Jenner, I also appealed to those who dislike her and see her as a problematic representation of a cultural trend toward superficiality. I reinforce their animus toward her by using the phrase “she’s for sure to blame for that Pepsi cringe-fest.” By using this reference to the Pepsi ad Jenner starred in, I am stoking this type of reader’s judgment toward her as a cultural figure who reinforces superficiality and a distorted image of reality, the same way the Pepsi ad distorted a complex social problem like police brutality. My emotional appeals were not limited to the love and hate attached to a popular public figure, as I also created sympathy for the unfortunately anonymous workers who were cheated out of their wages. I wanted to ensure that my audience was able to sympathize with those who faced some of the most dire consequences associated with the festival, writing that everyone was to blame “except the laborers who worked around the clock and never got paid, [and] who got little screen time, even less consideration, and no chance to have their voice heard.” By using rhetorical parallelism in this sentence, I linked the lack of “screen time” with having no voice, and so shifted the sentiment from just an opportunity to be in the film to the film acting as a part of the problem these workers faced. By implicating the film itself in the workers’ suffering, I am creating sympathy in my own audience and they are more likely to believe my message that the film was unsuccessful and instead be persuaded by my own message. By using multiple forms of pathos, including the affection and animus toward Jenner as well as the empathy toward the workers, I am moving my audience to accept the message that the Fyre Festival was not simply about one unethical incident but a facet of human nature that fuels all scams.

Samples

“The Failing New York Times:”

Using A Commercial to Craft Calm Amidst Political Tumult (and to make money)

****Disclaimer: This kind of Essay has headings and links/lists as a teaching tool. Also, the commercial it is based on is visual and I did not create it, but it is possible to write a commercial treatment and script as your RIP project and then write a RIP essay just like this one explaining HOW that commercial is persuasive, what its message is, and WHY you made the rhetorical choices you made to affect your audience.

TS #1: The Message

The core message of this advertisement is that by reading and subscribing to the New York Times, the reader will experience the clarity and calm they are seeking within a chaotic world that has made truth ever elusive. The first key rhetorical choice I made while constructing the ad was to use pathos, and in particular the emotions of fear and apprehension, to create a sense of unease in the audience. I created apprehension through layering multiple vocal tracks and creating an up-tempo visual that complemented the vocal track; rather than communicating clearly with the audience, both of these devices created a cacophony which was impossible to understand. In their article, “The Role of Fear in Persuasion,” Professors Jason Anderson and James Dillard write that “research on fear/threat appeals has correlated fear intensity with persuasion,” and so I used the audio and visual chaos to cast ideological confusion as a threat to the audience which would help heighten their susceptibility to the message that by reading our paper they could defend themselves against that threat (Anderson and Dillard 909). After the audio and visual stimuli gradually reach a frenetic crescendo, I then created a calm silence followed by four crystal clear piano notes, with the final note pitched lower as if it were a conclusive period in a sentence. A final higher pitched note would have affected the audience in the same way interrogative intonation does, as when we ask questions and we raise our vocal pitch at the end of the sentence. But I made the rhetorical choice not to pose a question at the end of the ad, but in fact to give the audience the answer: subscribe to the New York Times. The main rhetorical device of the ad, then, is not one based on logical argument (logos), but on the emotional trajectory I created by shaking the audience with fear and apprehension and then calming them, with the final lasting image of our brand as the conclusive ending to this emotional trajectory.

TS# 2: The Ethos of the New York Times
:

This emotional trajectory from fear to calm also need to be grounded by the New York Times’ ethos of objectivity and self-awareness, and so I interspersed liberal and conservative talking points in an alternate pattern to persuade the audience that our institutional credibility is committed to bi-partisan investigation. One of the most often talked about issues facing our culture today is pervasive media bias that caters exclusively to its own predetermined and loyal audience; one of the most effective rhetorical choices of the ad is to acknowledge this elephant in the room, which we did with the statement “the media is dishonest” flashing on the screen. By owning and acknowledging the audience’s possible distrust, we can begin to gain that trust by embracing their skepticism rather than more directly propping up our own trustworthiness. By carefully placing the audience’s concerns about the media front and center in our own media driven advertisement, the ethos of self-awareness we are building is meant to place the New York Times on the same side of the reader as a skeptical disbeliever in the ability of the media to tell the truth. The objectivity we create as part of our ethos is further reinforced by a nuanced assessment of truth as “hard to know,” and so we carefully obscured the possible bias of our publication by further developing this ethos not as a confident truth teller, but a humble investigator who stares down and faces the insurmountable amount of confusing information currently available in the atmosphere of our 24 hours news cycle. I previously noted how the actual music which is pathos based is meant to convey conclusive confidence; here I complemented this confidence with the ethos of self-awareness that any direct statement about such confidence would alienate an audience increasingly distrustful of national media outlets. Gallup, a nationally renowned research and polling company that has existed since 1935, conducted a poll on media distrust seen below which shows how in 2016 the public has reached a new national low fir having very little confidence in the mass media such as newspapers as the New York Times. Thus our ethos of self-awareness and objectivity was designed to counteract this tangibility distrust and hostility present in our audience (Swift).

Figure 1: Gallup Poll on Media Distrust

TS #3: The Audience (Gender/Class/Education/Political Leanings/Religion/Special Interests):

Even while I used this ethos of objectivity and self-awareness to persuade the audience of the ad that we offer professional and impartial reporting, our primary audience of potential subscribers was a politically liberal, coastal, college-educated, and middle aged audience whose demographics match the demographics of current readers and were predicted by the time slot of the Oscars Broadcast.

WHO already reads the New York Times:

http://www.ibtimes.com/audience-profiles-who-actually-reads-new-york-times-

watches-fox-news-other-news-publications-1451828

WHO watches the Oscars:

https://www.comscore.com/ita/Insights/Blog/Oscar-Efforts-Successfully-Court-

Younger-Demographics-Online

TS #4: The Historical/Cultural Context:

The concrete synchronicity between the age, gender, political beliefs, and education levels of our current audience and our potential readers was already an important reason to use the Oscars time slot, but even more importantly is the
context
of the recent surge in our subscriptions which proves that there is an unusually high level of interest in our paper because of a growing
cultural
issue with “fake news” and pronounced media bias.

Historical Context
: Sales are going up, which means there is a rising interest in the paper, thus making it more likely that the message of this commercial would be well received by the audience

Cultural Context
: Extreme distrust of media and very polarized media. Right wing people watch fox, left wing people watch CNN, and no one believes anything outside of their bubble

Outside Sources
:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-likes-conspiracy-theory-about-florida-shooting-survivors-ex-fbi-dad

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/10/5/16410912/illusory-truth-fake-news-las-vegas-google-facebook