A Letter To Myself

Dear 17-year old James,

            Who is your best friend right now? Shannon MacKenzie? I bet that you think you will be friends forever, don’t you? Unfortunately, we will never know how long our friendship with her could have endured because this is the year that I betrayed her. Luckily, you are in a position to listen to my advice and prevent this incident from ever happening. Maybe then we could still be friends now like we always thought would happen.

            This school year you will have many classes with that dramatic boy from your Human Anatomy class last year:  Colt Kitchin. Do you remember him? Well Shannon will not like your blossoming friendship with him because she will not appreciate his flair for dramatics and eventually you are going to have to choose between the two of them.

            Let me start by explaining what is going to happen. One day, during one of Colt and Shannon’s routine arguments, Colt takes the banter one step further by joking that Shannon’s mother is going to die from her terminal cancer. Because this is a touchy subject for Shannon, she snaps at his comment and slaps him before walking away. Startled, you stand there unsure of what to do . . . The next thing you know, Colt is trying to coax you into sign a witness form saying that you watched her slap him, a form that would get Shannon suspended . . . I signed the paper.

            One year later, Shannon’s mother actually passes away, but she stopped talking to me after I helped get her suspended, so I have not been able to seek her out and offer comfort to her. It is weird to know so much about someone that I am no longer friends with, and it is even more weird feeling as though I want to help someone but feel like trying to talk to her would open up old wounds.

            I think that if you do a few things differently, you can prevent some of these difficult transgressions. The first thing I would say is not to get so close to Colt. He may seem like a fun guy, but where is he now? I don’t know; somewhere off at college probably, but the point is that we are no longer concerned with keeping up with each other’s lives. The second thing I would suggest is to go comfort Shannon after she slaps him because that will prevent Colt from seeking out your help immediately afterword when you are still stunned. Then the third thing I think that you should do if Colt does come and ask you to sign the witness form is to NOT SIGN THE PAPER. Ultimately, she should not have slapped him, but do I think that she should have been suspended for doing so? No. Colt was just being dramatic and rude, as always.

            Please follow these steps and you can stay friends with Shannon. Maybe we will stay friends forever, or maybe we will stop being friends in another dramatic argument two weeks later. At least if we try this, however, we would be ending the friendship on our own terms and not because of a disagreement with someone else.

           

Sincerely,

            18-year old James

Redesign of Advertisement Essay Reflections

                Going into this assignment I felt fairly confident. I had created a well thought out proposal, and I really feel as though this gave me some clarity when I began writing the paper. When I was creating the proposal, I made many decisions as to how I would execute my redesign ideas.

            I initially chose to write about the GQ cover advertisement but soon found out that it was not an advertisement that would work. Because I had already finished writing my topic proposal by the time I discovered this, I chose a new advertisement that used many of the same elements so that I could use many of my original ideas.

            When I first started planning out my redesign, I thought of my intended audience. Because it was my goal to sell the same product in a different way, I had to think about what elements I could change that would make it appeal more to women. I also had to consider what elements were necessary to keep because ultimately I did not want to change the company’s message or image. I started my redesign by changing the model, and once I had a picture of him in my head, all of the other elements seemed to fall into place.

I had many concerns in the planning process for my essay. I think that my biggest concern was that I was not analyzing the rhetoric appeals correctly. It was difficult for me to make interpretations from looking at the advertisement because sometimes I felt as though I was looking too far into details. Similarly, I was concerned with whether or not my redesign would actually be effective for my intended audience. Eventually, with some tweaking to the initial plan, I feel that I was able to appeal to women like I wanted.

What I liked about this assignment was that it gave me the power to be creative. I love making things look nice, and this project gave me the opportunity to pull together unlike concepts and connect them to create a uniform message. I liked that I was creating an advertisement for a product that already exists because I would not have liked thinking up my own product. I also liked that I had an original ad to reference when I was creating my own advertisement.

After this essay, I definitely feel that I have a better understanding of the rhetoric appeals. I had learned them before, but I had never used them to analyze a piece of work before. Through the analysis I was able to see through Smartwater’s pretenses and figure out the message they were trying to convey.

If I were given a second chance at writing this essay, I might have added more analysis to my new advertisement. I feel that I analyzed the initial ad strongly, but by the time I started writing about the new ad, I fear that my thoughts might have sounded too repetitive. If I were given a chance to go back and edit my paper, I would probably try to come up with some more original ideas to analyze the second ad.