A broad textual genre that almost everyone is familiar with from a young age is advertisements. Advertisements use pictures and textual evidence to convey a message and sway their audience to buy a certain product, donate to a certain cause, support a certain idea, etc. A subgenre of advertisements are billboards. Billboards are usually large advertisements that are placed on the side of busy roads. A billboard in Massachusetts reads, “We’re not anti-gun. We’re pro-life. Massachusetts gun laws save lives.” The context and content of the billboard both have rhetorical features, such as exigence, audience, constraints, purpose, and choice of language, in order to persuade adult drivers and passengers to support laws on gun restrictions.
Gun use and the ability that people have to purchase guns is a controversial and relevant topic to discuss because shootings happen relatively often if people have access to guns. Many shootings, especially school shootings and other related incidents often make national news and are on people’s radar. The exigence, or the problem that elicited such an ad, is that there are shootings that people are aware of on a consistent basis. Shootings can be a touchy topic of conversation, and are not usually considered appropriate for children. Because of this fact, the intended audience of this billboard is likely adults and older teenagers. Because billboards are usually on highways where drivers tend to go by quickly, there are multiple inherent constraints on this ad as well. For example, the text has to be large enough to see from relatively far away, and the message has to be short, concise, and clear in order to be read and understood in a short amount of time. All of these contextual rhetorical features are to help get the purpose of the ad across, which is to convince a population of adults to support restrictions on gun laws.
Aside from the context of the ad, the content and use of concise language in the ad also help communicate the message. For example, the billboard uses three very short statements that take a clear stand on one side of the issue and explain why. By using the word “We’re” two times, the billboard creates a united front of people that are taking a stand against people having easy access to guns. This appeals to the intended audiences’ ethos, the trustworthiness of the source, by building a united source with morals concerning the lives of others. Then, by describing that they are “not anti-gun”, but rather “pro-life”, the billboard dissociates this group of people with the negativity of being against something, and reveals that they are just concerned with the lives of people. This appeals to the pathos, emotional side, of adults and young adults because it brings the life of other humans into the picture, making a statement that would be hard for anyone to disagree with. The ad then finishes with the simple statement of “Massachusetts gun laws save lives”. By making a very complex issue fit into three short sentences, this billboard simplifies the controversy of gun laws into a matter of caring about people’s lives or not caring.
Billboards often use rhetorical features such as these in their content and context in order to be effective in persuading their viewers. They often simplify much larger ideas into a few concise sentences, in order to be read quickly by drivers and make the biggest impact that they can. They also often appeal to the pathos of their audience, as this one does, in order to make their message effective in a short period of time. And lastly, they often contain issues that are not intended for younger viewers, who likely will not notice or see the billboards. The audience of billboards is usually adults because adults are the ones driving, and the ones who have an opinion that matters when voting or making changes in the world. Billboards are a specific type advertisements that are unlike other advertisements in all of these ways, which makes them a separate, more specific textual genre.
Hey Kailah! I liked how specific you were on your PB1. I could tell that you put a lot of thought on analyzing the different conventions and characteristics that billboards have. You also integrated what we read on Backpacks vs. Briefcases on a way that made your statements sound proper and credible. The use of words such as logos, ethos, etc. made your statements very accurate too! For a minute I thought that you were only going to talk about the gun law billboard example, but I liked how you analyzed billboards in general and used the gun billboard example to support that analysis.
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