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Ruby Zhang

Professor Allison Bocchino

Writing 2

17 October 2019

Writing Project 1

What do you do when you need to promote an event or a program? What do you do when

you really want to get people’s attention to something in a short amount of time? One of the

easiest ways to spread the information across is to send out flyers. When creating a flyer, there

are lots of different samples that people can use; however, when taking a closer look, these flyers

all have something in common. By using effective rhetoric, well-organized layout, format, and

sentence structures, selected contents, dictions, and tones, and getting around with the

constraints, these flyers are able to attract people’s eyes and spread the information effectively.

To better analyze the genre conventions of flyers, I found a total of four flyers and

compared the similarities and differences between them. The “travel with purpose” flyer

encourages students to participate in their volunteering program which allows students to travel

around the world, the “UCSB meet the firms” flyer promotes the event in which students get to

meet and network with the local accounting firms, the “SS805 dance audition” flyer encourages

students who enjoy dancing to join the audition, and the “gardening services” flyer promotes

their gardening services.

As mentioned, these flyers have a lot in common. First, they all utilized ethos to build

their credibility. To make the organization more trustworthy, most authors will put their
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information on the flyers. For example, on the “travel with purpose” flyer, the author writes the

name of their organization, “givevolunteers.org”. This shows that the creators of this program is

a trustworthy organization, and it makes the audience more likely to believe that this program is

well established. Similar information is also found in the other three flyers: “UCSB

Undergraduate Accounting Society” on the “meet the firms” flyer, “SS805” on the dance

audition flyer, and “Gomez Gardening Services” on the gardening flyer. This shows that

appealing to credibility is a very commonly used strategy when creating flyers.

Besides ethos, the flyers also have a similar format and sentence structures. For instance,

instead of having long, boring paragraphs, the author uses big headings, short phrases, and some

pictures to show the key points and to make it easy to read. Moreover, the color of the text is

usually in contrast to the background colors. These features make the important text stands out.

The flyers also have short, simple sentence structures. Some of them, such as the gardening flyer

and the “travel with purpose” flyer, also used bullet-points, lists, and pictures. Using these types

of sentence structures makes the flyers more interesting, and it helps to attract the audience at the

first look.

In addition, these flyers also have some similar content. To make the flyers less boring,

there are usually very little text on a flyer. However, no matter how little text a flyer has, there is

always some information that needs to be included on a flyer, for example, the contact

information. Contact information is included on most of the flyers in various ways: phone

numbers, addresses, and emails. Giving contact information is also a good way to establish

credibility. People are more confident about an event or service if they are able to contact

someone directly. Having contact information also ensures that people who need additional
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information about the event can access the information quickly. Other important information on

a flyer includes the address and time of the event or the price for services. This basic information

ensures that the information is communicated accurately.

The flyers not only have similar contents, but also uses similar dictions and tones. Most

flyers use informal language without slang or jargon because the audience usually have different

backgrounds. These flyers uses daily languages to avoid explaining the terms that takes up more

space. Besides that, most flyers also use a casual or passionate tone to help promote the event.

For example, in the “travel with purpose” flyer, the author uses a passionate tone by using words

like “volunteer to empower” and “adventure of a lifetime”. Using “adventure” instead of

“experience” makes the program sound more excited, and they help the author to persuade the

audience that the experience is meaningful. Using words like this can make the flyers more

attractive.

Lastly, there are some similar constraints for flyers. For instance, to reduce the

production cost, these flyers are usually small in size. Most of the flyers are about half-page

long. The size of the paper largely reduced the amount of information that can be included on the

flyer. Moreover, these flyers are usually not colorful. Some of the flyers are even printed

grayscale. To make the flyers more interesting, companies have to put more effort into changing

the font, sentence structures, and layouts.

Based on the information above, if I were to pick the best flyer out of the four flyers that I

have analyzed, I would choose the “travel with purpose” flyer. First, it builds its credibility by

using the name of the organization, which makes the program sounds more trustworthy. Second,

it uses a font that is easy to read, and it uses short phrases and pictures to make the flyer more
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interesting. This makes the flyer more attractive. Third, it includes important contents such as

contact information, time and place of the information session, and some key points of the

program. It also uses a passionate tone to encourage students to participate in the program. It is

printed grayscale, but because it is printed on a yellow colored paper, the flyer looks more

colorful.

Overall, the reason that these flyers are successful is that these flyers include effective

rhetoric, well-organized layout, format, and sentence structures, selected contents, dictions, and

tones, and get around with the constraints. They are created this way to attract people’s eyes and

to spread the information accurately. If companies follow the genre conventions mentioned

above, their flyers will be way more attractive than others.