Prissila Navarro, Francisco Montalvo, Gustavo Ramirez

Throughout our college career we will be using our most beloved website of
all time, Blackboard. So what better way to express our love for it than analyzing it
using Pathos, Logos and Ethos? Using pathos we will be discussing how Blackboard
appeals to our emotions as students, faculty, and staff. With logos we will see how
trustworthy the website is and how easy it is to navigate through it. Lastly with
ethos, we will discuss Blackboards credibility.
First, Blackboard uses three colors: blue, orange, and white; the colors of
UTEP. By using these three colors the website shows loyalty to its host university.
The font that blackboard uses is the basic font, Calibri. At first glance, Blackboard
has a lack of pathos because it shows no emotional appeal. It has no sound and
very few pictures that come along with it. However, once you really get to know
Blackboard board you can see that it is full of pathos. For example, when you press
on a course the professor of that course has the ability to insert a picture in their
home page and you can upload a picture of yourself, or anything you want onto
your profile. When you really get to know blackboard you see that you are able to
personalize it, so much that it seems to be your child once you finish personalizing
it. When using this website you may have a love-hate relationship with it; you hate
it because it crashes, freezes and does not do what you want it to do at times.
However, you end up loving it because it tells you what the teacher wants you to
do, or when your assignments are due. You will also love it because there is a single
place where you can submit your assignments without having to run all over the
university campuses to get them in to your professors hands.
The second rhetorical appeal was logos. The layout of the blackboard website
is so organized that no one needs much training to become a master of it. The use
of the website is so simple once you get the experience of navigating through it, the
whole website becomes a simple breeze in no time. The amazing thing about
blackboard is it is always up to date and is, for the most part, factually correct.
Blackboard has correct grammar and punctuation, so we do not need to worry about
that. One huge setback is that it crashes every so often, so you have to be careful
with that. Also, since the website does require constant updating it can become
very annoying at times.
To continue, blackboard does not have much ethos. Other than blackboards
affiliation to the university itself with use of the domain.Edu, there are a lack of
other forms of ethos. Using the domain .edu means that there are many credentials
needed since it means that the website has the respect and approval of not just the
states, but the United States board of education. Also since it is used throughout
the United States with a variety of universities, we can assume that all of
blackboard credential is acceptable.
In other words, Blackboard does a good job appealing to its normal users,
students, faculty, and staff with its use of pathos, logos and ethos as stated above.
Even though it does still have its flaws, it also is successful as a whole. Even though
out of the three rhetorical appeal ethos is the weak of all. Now in reality there is no
excuse why no one would be able to grasp the simple understanding of the website
because of its simple commands. Hopefully you have understood by now that
blackboard is very user friendly.

Prissila Navarro, Francisco Montalvo, Gustavo Ramirez