Reflection on CGP

The Common Good Project was a great way to for me personally to engage in an assignment that was interesting enough to help me learn and apply a lot of the tools and rhetorical devices we learned over the semester while also being in a group environment and interacting with the various people worked with while completing the project. I think I mostly learned about pathos as we went through our project as our goal was to show that immigrants are not just stats or criminals as they are made out to be in the media recently but to portray them as everyday people such as you and I through a strong emotional appeal. The specific tool of amplification as a persuasive rhetorical tool was a big one for my group in achieving our goal, this tool is seen in our video when my teammates are talking about their journeys to America and we hear the same message over and over again, “It was long and hard.” This was a very nice touch by our video creator Abbie Bonilla who put these clips together well to really pull on the heart strings of our viewers. The tools of goal setting and decorum were also very important in this project. Goal setting was done and achieved in the first meeting between Abbie and Emily where the picked our topic and set the out the purpose for this project. Decorum was more subtly used by something simple as me telling my teammates to wear everyday clothes (i.e. nothing saying Longwood soccer or anything to formal) to project the image that immigrants are everyday people too and not just numbers, criminals, athletes and that they are defined by so much more than just that. This project also helped me to achieve learning outcome 2 in that it helped me analyze a current relevent issue and apply rhetorical tools to further analyze explain and expand on said issue.

 

Here is the link to our group website made by my classmate Emily Gough: The Humanizers

Here is the link to our CGP video:The Humanizers