Rhetorical Situations

• Purpose: The differences between the purpose of a literacy narrative and an ad analysis paper are that in a literacy narrative paper, you are either sharing a past memory or a learning experience and the significance of the event and how it has affected you. The purpose of an ad analysis is to analyze an ad and to either demonstrate that you understand the ad, to persuade readers that the ad shows a certain point or use the ad as a way to make some other point like how women were viewed in the 1920s and now or how views have changed throughout time. 

The only similarity between the two types of papers is that you have to let the readers of your paper know why you are doing what you are doing for the paper.

• Audience: The differences between the audience of the two papers is that for a literacy narrative paper, you need to know if your audience would have had similar experiences like yours, would the stories be similar, how much explaining of things do you need for your audience, would your audience get the meaning/significance of the memory and how much about your own personal life are you willing to share. For an ad analysis, you need to know if your audience has ever read or seen the ad you are analyzing or know of the ad you are analyzing and how much detail you need to put in your paper like do you need to put the whole ad or a pic of the ad in your paper or just pieces of it. 

The similarity between the two is that you need to decide on the amount of detail you need to put in your paper either on the amount of personal detail from your life to the amount of detail from your ad.

• Tone: The tone of a literacy narrative paper can be affectionate, neutral, critical, sincere, serious, humorously detached, self-critical, self-effacing, anything you want. It is your paper. You can have a serious tone paper but make some funny comments in between. As long as the tone matches what you want the paper to have, that the tone matches the meaning behind the paper, you can have any tone you want. The tone of an ad analysis paper can be critical, serious, self-critical, neutral, etc. The tone for this type of paper in someway has to be critical because you are analyzing a paper in great detail, in such a way that other people don't think of it. 

The similarity between the two is that both papers can have a critical tone but there are critical in different ways. In the narrative paper, you are critical about your memory and its effects on you while in the analysis paper, you are critical on how the ad was made, how it gets people's attention and you have to read between the lines or images in the ad.

• Genre: The genre of literacy narratives includes everything I have said before. It includes the different purposes, the different things a writer can do for his/her audience, and have any tone the writer wants. The genre of literacy narratives have key features. These features are: a well-told story, have vivid detail in it and have some indication of the narrative's significance. 

For the ad analysis genre, the key features are: the paper includes a summary of the text and/or a picture of the text, the papers are attention to the context, there is a clear interpretation or judgement in the paper and there is reasonable support for your conclusions. Also the genre includes everything else that I talked about before with the audience, purpose and tone.

The different rhetorical situation can affect your choices you make when writing your paper by way of how you start your paper, how you end it, how much detail you put into it, even your topic that you are writing about. Everything you do for writing a paper can be changed depending on what you choose for the different rhetorical situations and what you want to do for them as well. Rhetorical situations have a lot of influence on people's papers.