Rhetorical Criticism by Savannah Dyer

For my artifact, I’m going to be analyzing a PSA from the United States Food and Drug Administration.

Agent: Amanda Green, the young woman seen in the video.

Act: A girl signing a contract with a cigarette, leaving her friends to go outside and smoke. shaking her head, wishing she could stop.

Agency: Shows the “real cost” of smoking cigarettes by illustrating what Amanda is having to give up in order to maintain her habit.

Scene: A park, a restaurant, and an alley.

Purpose: To convince the audience that the “real cost” of cigarettes is not worth signing away your freedom to it.

Dominant term: The dominant term in this artifact is the cigarette. Every decision Amanda makes is with the cigarette in mind. One of the ratios is act-purpose. By seeing Amanda “sign” a contract with cigarettes, we see the “real cost.”

Critical Essay #2: For Critical Essay #2, I will be using ideological criticism to assess how the Twitter accounts of three of the most popular men’s college basketball teams of the 2017-18 season promote their brand: Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. As a basketball fan, what won me over in supporting a team had a lot to do with the social media presence at the time. Looking at the brand ideology behind each account is fascinating, and I’m almost done with my rough draft.

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