THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

Purpose

Audience

Rhetorical appeals

Modes & media

Purpose

Sunni Brown wants to persuade her audience that doodling, though considered socially unacceptable in many settings, is actually a very effective tool for recording, absorbing, and retaining information. As she seeks to persuade, she also seeks to entertain her audience and hold their interest with visuals, humor, focused statements, and brisk pacing.

Audience

Brown’s audience is made up of information geeks, designers, writers, and doodle enthusiasts who appreciate irony, comedy, comics, and pop culture.

Rhetorical appeals

Brown builds ethos as a creator of doodles and expert on visual thinking. As a professional, scholar, and coauthor of a book on innovation and visual thinking, she is recognized by her viewers as an authority on her topic.

Brown appeals to her audience using logos by presenting specific examples in an orderly way.

She connects with viewers’ sense of pathos through her use of humor—both in what she’s saying and what she’s showing.

Modes & media:

Mode = audio and visual Brown uses a combination of audio and visuals throughout her presentation. The audio is her voice presenting ideas, along with laughter from the audience. Her visuals are the images on her slides, which include doodles, comics, and hand-drawn infographics.

Medium = face-to-face and video This talk was originally delivered before a live audience. In the example given, the presentation is digital, since it is a recording of the original talk that can be found on the Ignite Web site.