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Sam Helmick

Kate Kimball

ENC2135

December 2, 2021

Multigenre Persuasive Campaign Rationale

In this project, I wanted to take a new approach to the controversial topic of

privatized space companies: I wanted to convince my audience that commercial space efforts are

beneficial and produce valuable services and products to humanity. My target audience for this

endeavor was the teenage population, particularly those who did not have much knowledge about

the topic. Subsequently, I created a fake newsletter organization named “Space Newsletter X”

and chose to use three genres I believed easily accessible to teens. I tried to use different

approaches for each composition despite them all belonging under the same imaginary

organizational umbrella.

The first artifact I created was a twitter account for the fake newsletter. The purpose of

this was to be easily accessible to teens, and being a popular social media platform, twitter holds

a lot of sway over them. The twitter account would tweet live updates and news, while providing

credible sources to support the information presented. Thus, the twitter account primarily used

logos (the news tweets were informative and contained only objective facts) and ethos (providing

sources established credibility and showed that the presented information was well-researched).

Moreover, I attempted to give the twitter account a semi-professional voice to accentuate the

more objective rhetorical approach and reinforce the appeal to credibility and professionalism
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while not becoming unappealingly sterile. I would do all this while keeping it simple and

accessible for a younger audience.

For example, one of the newsletter’s tweets stated “The DART (Double Asteroid

Redirection Test) rocket successfully lifted off on November 23rd, 10:21pm EST. The rocket

should hit the target asteroid in 11 months, at a whopping speed of 15,000 miles per hour!” This

encapsulates the voicing intended for the twitter account. Providing facts with a professional tone

while allowing for some excitement to creep into the voicing and providing a fun fact to capture

the attention of otherwise potentially disinterested teens. Being a twitter post, it is constrained to

the 280-character limit, and thus there is not much room for longer-form writing or extensive

information. However, I used this limit to my advantage: I wrote short, bite-sized news updates

and bits of information that had all the necessary information and content while being short

enough to remain digestible to teens with short attention spans and even shorter patience for long

reads.

Unfortunately, despite these steps taken to ensure engagement with teens, the twitter

account only received one follower over the course of the project, and none of its posts ever

received a “like.” Upon reflection, I think the big problem with it was that I never had the

account reply to any actual twitter posts or interact with communities. It simply tweeted into the

twitter void, and as a result few users likely encountered it. If I were to do it again, I would try to

get the account more involved in other posts within the scientific community and a broader teen

community to get more visibility. Overall, I think that while my vision for the twitter account

was realized, the overall goal of gaining attention from teen users on twitter was ultimately not

reached.
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The second artifact I created was an email for a newsletter signup. This was to provide a

more direct, personal route to a teen who have not interacted much with the discussion

surrounding commercial space. Moreover, the email was saturated with pathos, as it was

primarily trying to convince otherwise disinterested teens in the exciting future in space to get

them to sign up for the newsletter. I wanted to give the email a more chipper, excited voice using

engaging questions and positive language.

For example, the organization writes in one part of the email, “The technological and

scientific advancements made possible by these private space companies are truly the exciting

way of the future! We the Space Newsletter X team pride ourselves…” This exemplifies how the

email uses pathos to make the reader excited about the commercial space industry, while

simultaneously using excited voicing to reinforce this. The shortcoming of the email format is

that it can easily lose the reader’s attention if it does not hook them, especially when it is a

promotional email from a newsletter. As such, I played to this by using exciting language and

subject matter to try and grab a potential teen reader’s attention before they click off.

Overall, I think the email lacked any noticeable flaws in performance the way that the

twitter account did, and the final product matches my vision for what the email would look like,

so I believe that it is a successful attempt and would potentially persuade a teen to take interest in

private space industry and subscribe to the newsletter.

Finally, the third artifact I made was a website for the fictional newsletter I created. The

purpose of the website would be to capture the visitor’s attention and use a visually appealing

layout to provide accessible information about the current space industry. The website used bits

of all three rhetorical appeals: ethos via citing and referencing sources, pathos through portraying
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commercial space in an exciting and positive light, and logos through a page reporting news in a

factual manner.

The shortcoming of a website as an informative and persuasive medium is that it can be

difficult to find specific things a user is looking for, which I addressed by simply organizing

different information into labeled pages on the website and making an easily accessible menu on

the homepage to go straight to the information the user wants to see. The website itself actually

had one unique visit, but the user did not stay on the website long before leaving, so overall I

would have to deem the website as a failed attempt to capture and retain teen user attention.

However, I think it would have performed better had I paid to have the website promoted, so I

think the setup of the website was satisfactory and aligned with my vision.

In sum, I initially had in mind the idea that I would create a fake newsletter brand with

every online facility such organizations have: website, social media, emails, everything. Clearly,

that structure remained to the end of the project. However, the journey to the final product was

more in finding and attending to the nuance that had to go into the project. In all honesty, my

initial concept for having a large-scale fictional newsletter organization was led more by a fun

fantasy fueled only by my desire to create a fun narrative to stay interested in working. My initial

approach to the artifacts was to make them all seem very professional yet accessible, utilizing the

same rhetorical strategies and persuasive approaches. But as I worked on them, I realized that,

despite wanting one cohesive organization, I would need to give each piece a unique identity and

voice to abide by the guidelines of the project. Thus, I brainstormed ways to make each artifact

stand out and the result is the final iteration of the works detailed previously.
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To finish it off, this class has helped me shake off the writing habits I picked up in high

school, where I would write the monotonous five-paragraph essay for every assignment. Through

this class, I have been able to start expressing myself more through how I format and structure

my work, and I think it has helped elevate my writing. Such elevation is important because

writing assignments have changed between high school and college currently. There is much

more emphasis on freedom of formatting, as long as it fits within a required word count.

Ultimately, I feel prepared to go into higher classes in my field of study with the tools I have

obtained in this class.