Analysis: Effectiveness, Ethics, Artistry

The ad analysis assignment is designed so that you merely need to make an argument about the rhetorical functioning of the advertisement in question.  But sometimes rhetoricians wish to go a step further and include a judgment--an overall assessment of the quality of a particular rhetorical artifact.

The three main kinds of judgments that can be reached concern an artifact's effectiveness, its ethics, and its artistry.  The last of these can be tricky for beginning rhetoricians; unless someone is well versed in the nature of the field, his or her sense of taste will be more idiosyncratic (personal preference/opinion) rather than an authoritative assessment.

Source: Ira Glass.  Layout is from an unknown Tumblr user.  (Tumblr is pretty terrible for keeping track of image ownership.)

For an example of moving from analysis all the way to judgment:

Although it's not quite looking at an advertisement, this opinion piece from The New York Times, engages in a (brief) rhetorical assessment of Wikipedia's SOPA protest of a few weeks ago, and judges the rhetoric to be unethical.  Now, for our analysis we'd likely also want to attend more to the specific features of the rhetoric itself. (How did the specific wording of the protest message contribute to their rhetorical goals?  How did the language / layout / use of black add to or shape the pathos appeal? etc., etc.)  But it does a nice job of engaging several elements the rhetorical situation, which could serve as a great (and necessary) foundation for the depth of analysis we're looking for in this class.