Short Essay

Short Essay Assignment

The short essay is a 2-page (double spaced and 12-point font size) analysis of the quality of a persuasive campaign website.

The essay asks you to choose and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of a persuasive campaign.

Please choose one website from the below categories:

Commercial: (I choose this one)

You will only examine one website and its contents. Please focus on the main contents including texts, images, and videos.

Your task is to provide your evaluation of the campaign. This will require you to examine the webpage contents carefully and write a short essay on its strengths and weaknesses. Your essay should use what you have learned about persuasion to describe what is strong and why; and to describe what is weak — and especially what is missing — in terms of message and communication strategies in successful persuasion.

First, you will write a short paragraph addressing the following questions: (1) What problem does the persuasion campaign target? (2) Who are the potential interested target audiences (*describe the target audiences characteristics, such as demographics, socioeconomic status, ideology, education backgrounds, interests, etc.)?

Then, you will delve into analyzing the persuasive messaging. A well written and well received essay will include: (1) Two elements of the webpage that are likely to be particularly effective in fulfilling the persuasive goal. Justifying your statements of support from your knowledge and that of other experts (that is from class lectures and/or readings) will be crucial to establishing your credibility and quality in writing. (2) One messaging strategies that are missing from the webpage that you think the organization should be aware of in their messaging. Here you will likely go beyond the existing contents to include other messaging elements. Once again, the credibility and persuasiveness of your essay will hinge on citing messaging elements that have an established base in research and theory (that is, from lecture or readings).

In general, the more sources employed from both reading and lecture, the better your essay will be. An essay that draws all elements from a single reading or lecture will be considered inadequate.

Notes:

• No formal reference or citation is required. However, you may include any reference or citation if you like.
• You can go beyond 2 pages a little bit (e.g., 3-5 more sentences, a short paragraph).

Above is the requirement of the essay, I attached all the class powerpoint and readings below for the use in essay. You can choose the concepts from these readings and lecture powerpoint to apply on the essay.