Jameson Crawford Angel Matos WR 13300-06 23 October 2012 Self Assessment The rhetorical analysis paper involved a lot

more work than the audio narrative paper. Not only was the length requirement longer, but the rhetorical analysis paper required an exploration of the workings of rhetoric in a wide range of media. Unlike the audio narrative, the rhetorical analysis paper involved more instruction on how to write the paper. But this instruction was very helpful in grasping the idea of how rhetoric works. Also, the rhetorical analysis paper required researching media that used rhetoric. It was hard to find media that used rhetoric well and enough to write six pages about. Ultimately, I was left with a two choices. One was The Maine Tobacco Helpline commercials that used rhetoric to attract smokers to call the helpline. The other was how NBC logically incorporated a wide range of topics for their shows and emotionally touching shows to attract a wide range audience and thus more viewers than other stations. In the end, I chose The Maine Tobacco Helpline commercials because I felt it was a unique topic with a lot to say about rhetoric, even more so than NBC's shows. Not only do the commercials have a logical use of words, but they also have an appeal to emotion stronger concerning death that does a better job persuading than NBC's shows do persuading people to watch their station. So I had my topic of anti-smoking commercials chosen. Growing up seeing the commercials all the time on local stations, I had a strong connection to the commercials and even thought not a smoker myself, the message became embedded into my conscious and was probably the most influential factor in preventing me from smoking. But my goal wasn't to show prevention from smoking but was to show how the commercial influences smokers. I knew this would be easy enough to accomplish given all of the rhetoric the advertisements use. So I started by looking for commercials on YouTube. I was able to find a good amount of them and they all had the rhetorical devices I was looking for. Also, during Fall break, when I returned home, I was on the lookout for the commercials on the local NBC channel. Not to my surprise, they showed up several times and I even cite one of them in my list of sources for the textual evidence of rhetoric they encompass. This worked out perfectly since I was not able to find their famous slogan "Quit smoking now. Here's how" on the commercials they uploaded to YouTube. When I wrote my first draft, I found myself struggling to exceed three pages due to time constraints with studying for exams I had right before break. But I was still able to write the basics of my evidence in these three pages. The weakness of my first draft was an argument that was debatable. Angel helped with me through this weakness during our meeting during his office hours and I was able to form a debatable argument after we discussed how I could use another state's commercials to compare Maine's commercials with. After our meeting, during Fall break, I was able to do research on other state's commercials and I found New York's commercials to be best fit for comparison. These commercials didn't use all of the rhetorical strategies Maine's did, but for the ones they did, I was able to show how Maine's were more effective in instilling an awareness of the consequences of smoking in smokers' consciousness. After the peer review session today, several weaknesses in my essay were brought to my attention. Of these, the biggest was the repetition of the words "commercial" and "smoking" which I was able to reduce from around 40 times to 30 times using Voyant Tools. Not only did I grasp a stronger understanding of rhetoric and a debatable argument through this essay, but I was also made aware of Voyant Tools, an excellent tool to look at the mechanics of word choice when editing drafts.