The purpose of the Common Good Project was to allow students to go through the process of creating a rhetorical artifact. For the project group that I was apart of, our main focus was on mental health of college students and how nature can be a resource for healing. We created a website that focuses primarily on anxiety and depression and provides resources such as hotlines, videos of celebrities who struggle with mental illness, facts about depression and anxiety, etc. Our goal was to persuade students to take care of their mental health.
As discussed in our rationale statement we used a total of ten rhetorical strategies that we learned in class. An example of some of the strategies we used include keeping things simple, pathos and logos. We used keeping things simple by having our website very easy to navigate with the target audience being college students. However we also focused on the general public as well because we wanted to be inclusive as possible. We used pathos by including the video testimonials of the celebrities. By including these videos, we appeal to audience members who may look up to some of the celebrities included. Lastly, we used logos through one of our group members, Haley. Haley is a Psychology major who had access to textbooks that included researched information about anxiety and depression. Logos was used because the information that we provided was logical in nature.
Below are copies of our brochure, our rationale statement that discusses the rhetorical tactics we used as well as a link to our website:
https://shawnamccann.wixsite.com/breakingthestigma The Website Link