Analyzing the Rhetoric of Commercials Using Grant-Davie

by Addison Cornwell

Introduction

This activity itself is actually inspired by one of the “Before you read” activities given in the introduction to Grant-Davie’s article in the Writing About Writing book.  The given activity tells students to go home and watch an ad on TV and to think critically about what it is saying and who wrote the text of the ad.  I felt that this activity could be expanded upon and made to work in class, which is how this activity emerged.  The goal of this activity is to reinforce what students have read about in the Grant-Davie piece “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” and the four concepts of exigence, rhetor(s), audience, and constraints.

Prep-Work

Before this activity can be done the students should have read Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” so that they have an understanding of terms like exigence, rhetor, audience, and constraints and can apply these terms to examples.  It might be worth positioning this activity after an in-class discussion of the reading to really make sure that the students understood the reading and that they are ready to apply it to examples.  The instructor also will need to have a handful of advertisements ready to show the students for the actual activity.

The Activity

For the actual activity, the instructor will show their students an advertisement.  Depending on how much time they are willing to spend on this activity they could do this activity for multiple ads back-to-back.  After viewing the ad, the instructor can pose a series of questions to the students, related to Grant-Davie’s piece, to determine if they can apply what they have learned.  As Grant-Davie divides his article into four categories, the instructor could ask four sets of questions relating to each.

First, there can be a series of questions about the exigence of the advertisement: What is the ad about? Why is the ad needed or is it even needed?  What is the ad trying to accomplish?

Second, the instructor could ask questions about the rhetor(s): Who wrote/created this advertisement? What do you know about them? Is there a spokesperson in the ad? What is their role in relation to the rhetor(s)?

Third, the instructor could ask questions about the audience: Who is the ideal audience of the advertisement? What unintended audiences would likely be exposed to the advertisement?

Finally, there can be a series of questions about constraints: What constraints did the rhetor(s) likely face in making the advertisement?  Which of these could be seen as assets and which could be seen as liabilities?

Conclusion

Ideally, this activity will not only give students a chance to see what they’ve just learned applied to a situation, but also the students will hopefully enjoy the work.  Many advertisements can have humorous rhetoric, but other advertisements can have more serious rhetoric so it is really up to the instructor to determine which way they want to take the activity with their advertisement choices.  If multiple ads are utilized the instructor can help more for the early ones and let the students take the lead on later ones to determine if they are really learning.  Instructors can also increase the difficulty of the analysis, by including really obvious advertisements early on and then moving on to ads that are more subtle or serious, to really test their students.  Either way, after the activity the instructor can reiterate the importance of being able to do this kind of analysis and then they can relate it to other activities or papers in the class that this ability will be relevant to.

Personal Analysis

I decided to do this activity in my class because my students seemed to have trouble answering questions like the ones I have given above for a news article even after we discussed the Grant-Davie reading in class.  As usual, one of my classes responded a lot better to this activity than the other.  The better class was trying to answer the questions and to determine what the underlying rhetoric of the advertisement was.  I could never really get the other class as excited.  I had to cold-call students to get answers and even then many of those answers where not given a lot of effort.  I think maybe adding a competitive edge to this activity might help.  I’m not sure how I would do that, but I’ve noticed in the past that adding competitive games sometimes gets students who have never been engaged to start acting very passionately about my class.