Analysing Rhetoric in an Advertisement

The intended audience of this ad are potential customers for trucks, as the ad emphasizes Volvo's "Volvo Dynamic Steering". By having famed action-star Jean-Claude van Damme preform a split in between two Volvo trucks fitted with dynamic steering, the advert uses both ethos and logos. By having Van Damme, a celebrity famed for similar stunts, they are giving a bit of sincerity and credibility to their advert, as people trust in Van Damme and will more willing to trust the ad as a result, fulfilling the ethos requirement. Van Damme also has a monologue where he details his life, adding to the ethos factor of the ad. To appeal to logos, the ad states that the stunt was set up to test the "stability and precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering", and as the test went on successfully, the viewer therefore concludes that the dynamic steering must be quite good, in order to have been able to achieve that stunt. To appeal to pathos, the ad has Van Damme doing a precarious stunt (the split), that would usually have viewers on 'the edge of their seats' so to say, but to counter this, they have calming music in the background, putting the viewer at ease, and also implying that the dynamic steering is so good, Van Damme was never in any real danger. All of these factors seek to get the viewer to see Volvo Dynamic Steering as a superior product to their competitors, and hopefully for them, as a result, buy more Volvo trucks.

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Print Advertisement: Nivea Moisturizer

To start off, here's some basic information about the advert. Its target audience is young women, as the main focus of the advert is a young woman, and the product is cosmetic, a product type commonly advertised to this target audience. The cosmetic in question is "Nivea Smooth Milk: Body", a type of moisturizing cream. As the ad is written in English and comes from a German (Western) company, it can be concluded that this advert comes from a Western cultural background. Since Nivea was founded in 1911, it can be inferred that this ad was made in 2011, due to the quote "100 years skin care for life". The ad seems to imply that physical attractiveness is the most important factor in a happy relationship, due to the happy couple featured in the image, and the slogan "For visibily smooth and touchably soft skin" (misspellings came with the ad), which seems to imply to the viewer that moisturizer brought the couple closer together (the image has the...

Okonkwo as a Tragic Hero (Things Fall Apart)

Taking the cultural context of Things Fall Apart into account, there are a few reasons for why Achebe would characterise Okonkwo using the tragic hero archetype. The character of Okonkwo could be an allegory for the Ibo people as a whole, for example, since throughout the story we see various parallels between Okonkwo’s situation and the situation of the Ibo people and culture. In Part One of the book, both Okonkwo and the Ibo people are well established; Okonkwo has wealth, family, and stability, and the Ibo society is functioning as it has been in the years before. However, in Part Two, we see this begin to unravel, as Okonkwo is exiled, and the colonisers begin to arrive, introducing Christianity, slaughtering a village; bringing great change, and shaking up the cultural stability. At the end of Part Three, we see the full breakdown of both Okonkwo and the old Ibo culture. Okonkwo, of course, kills a court messenger, and then kills himself wh...

Said Mahran Characterisation Blog Post

Passage: First stream-of-consciousness in chapter 4 This passage shows the reader what Said Mahran now thinks of his old mentor figure, Rauf Ilwan. In the previous chapter, Rauf, though cordial in his demeanor to Mahran, rejects his wish to work as a journalist at his newspaper – due to Mahran’s lack of qualifications, but gives him some money, and states that “No job is menial, as long as it is honest”. In the passage, Said concludes that Rauf as evolved into someone else and has abandoned and/or betrayed his ideals. As characteristic of stream of consciousness, this passage operates non-chronologically, beginning with Mahran’s thoughts on the ‘new Rauf’, and going through his thought process that brings him to remember how he was betrayed by Ilish, and ranks them similarly in terms of how he feels they have betrayed him. The hatred expressed by Said in lin...

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