Rhetorical Analysis In Advertising

After graduating from Bluffton University, I plan on working somewhere within the public relations profession, so being able to understand and analysis different forms of advertisements will be extremely beneficial later on. One specific type of advertisement that I should be familiar with is public service announcements. Public service announcements, or PSA, promote programs, activities, services of governments, and they also can be used for those same purposes but for non-profit organizations. In other words, these are announcements that are driven from community interests. After spending sometime looking at different variations of PSA, I’ve noticed that there were a small group of advertisements that I saw that had similar qualities to one another. Each of the advertisements that I looked at were part of a bigger campaign to bring awareness to issues that women are currently facing in the world. Though all three of these PSA had addressed slightly

The type of analysis that I decided to do for my three PSA is rhetorical. Rhetoric in simple terms is how we use symbols made by human to influence and move other humans. When it comes to the analysis of rhetoric, you must look at the interactions between a text, the author/producer, and the intended audience. But more importantly, when doing this kind of analysis, you have to ask yourself and answer two questions. What does this text say and how does the text say it? The goal of rhetorical analysis is to take into consideration the purpose, audience, genre, stance, and design of the given media. This relates to the whole idea of denotation and connotation. Denotation is the literal meaning of a word while the connotation is the associations that are connected to a certain word or the emotional suggestions based on that word. You are not talking about what the message of the media is that the author or producer is trying to show their audience, but rather how they have produced the media to share with their