Reflection

All in all I believe that I did a fairly good job composing the paper over all.  There were a few points where digging into the posters to find the Ethos, Logos,and Pathos were rather challenging.  It is hard to look “beneath” the poster and see how it was constructed to catch the readers attention.  It was also interesting some of these posters used fear to get the readers to do what the people that created it wanted them to do.  

Looking back I believe that I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in this paper.  This is my first professional rhetorical analysis ever in my college career, I guess I could have done one subconsciously in the course of my college career, but this is my first one I have submitted for an academic grade.  Once I got into a sort of rhythm of composing and drafting my paper, explaining the Ethos, Logos, and Pathos became very easy.  I hope that it actually was easy, and I just did not do it wrong.

I believe that I went with my design plan.  I believe that I followed all the main points of my design plan as well.  I explained the Ethos, Logos, and Pathos for each poster.  I also explained how the visual and the text worked together to get the message across to the reader, or audience.  Overall rhetorical analysis did start off as something big and scary, but once you dive into it, it really is not that bad.  I thought that it was going to be impossible to do because it looked hard, but as it turns out it really was not.

Rhetorical Analysis: Purpose statement & Design plan

Sorry about my post being late I had issues with Blogger for a few days.

American World War II Posters.

As a veteran of the U.S. Military I thought it would be a great idea to do my visual rhetorical analysis on American world war II propaganda posters.  Everybody has seen these posters, the famous poster of Uncle Sam with text reading “I want you for the U.S. Army”, and the poster of the woman factory worker with the text reading “We can do it”.  I think I would be fascinating to analyze these posters because of their history and popularity in the culture of our country. These posters help fuel the war effort and called thousands of young men and women to arms. These posters gave the families of those men and women the feeling that they were directly helping the men on the frontline. I feel that analyzing these posters will help me understand the way the people felt when they say these posters for the first time. 

Medium and Production: I will be using four American World War II posters to do my analysis.  Two of which will be well known to our culture, and two wont be as well known so I can have a well rounded view of the posters used during this time period.

Strategies:

Ethos: I will start by looking at the creators of these posters and their credibility.  These posters were probably made by the by the government or at least approved by the government.  Being the government of the united states I would say that these posters had a lot of credibility behind them.  For the effectiveness of these posters we can look to history and see how popular these posters were.  They made men enlist into the army, civilians bought war bonds, and the women built plains and weapons in factories across America.

Logos: Every poster I have chosen has a pretty good argument.  Every poster is supporting the war effort in America,  I want to I've even deeper into explaining the arguement when I write my paper.  Every poster I have chosen seems to grab your attention at the center then you move your eye to the top of them to the text then to the picture again. I think that these poster have great movement and get their point across.

Pathos:  These posters in this series I will be doing my analysis on tug on the heart strings of the American public in a few different ways.  One of the ways is that they make you feel sympathy for the men fighting in the front line. Another way they pull emotion out of you is using fear of Germany invading the mainland United States, and that sharing secret information can sink ships.

Arrangement: Even though this is a paper I still need to keep the arrangement of the text and posters into account.  I have to make sure that my pictures are next to the text about them so my readers do not get confused about which poster I am analyzing.

Here are the posters I have chosen.