This phase was about developing our own Visual Argument, my poster, and reasoning as to why it is rhetorically successful. My main claim for my image is about education and the necessity of reform; for the essay it is about how my poster was rhetorically strong because of how it appeals to my intended audience emotionally. My audience for the image are New Yorkers and for the actual essay was a board of governors in order to prove that my visual is rhetorically strong. This essay illustrates my ability to understand my audience values and how my poster properly appeals to these values as a whole, there were many revisions of both the poster image and the actually essay.
Children are curious individuals that love to learn, they absorb information up like a sponge. Yet when forced to sit down and read a book, do math problems, or take a test they become antsy. Why? Because children do not enjoy it if it does not interest them. Children need to be stimulated and acquire the desire to learn. Children cannot sit down, sometimes hours at a time, and forced to learn topics that don’t interest them. Most of these topics are not even taught in a way that is engaging students to learn. Instead, in modern day society, young students are being taught how to take exams and not how to learn, being forced at a young age to take standardized tests. The results, begin to divide classrooms in the teacher’s eyes. Instead of promoting a classroom built on community it creates an unbalance classroom, one that fosters the values of high grades and leaves students behind when they cannot grasp the topic.
With the rise in standardized exams the rate of anxiety in young children is too increasing. While in many countries where students are not introduced to exams until later in their academic years their anxiety and dropout rate is not nearly as high as America’s. In response to this problem I designed a visual argument that will appeal to viewer’s emotional in order to compel them into action on educational reform.
I present below the image of a young female student with blond hair cascading over her right shoulder and her head being held up with her right hand. She is staring intensely down at her books. Her eyes are lightly rimed red and the developments of bags are present under her eyes. Her mouth is tight and her shoulder drawn up towards her, over all her expression can be summed up as stressed. She is sitting in a desk staring intensely at the open book that is opened. In front of her is a stack of seven large books with papers underneath them. On the top of the image, going over the top of her head are the words “I’m not good at math. I have no talents. I’m just not smart. I CAN’T” in large black font. Going across the bottom of her image, starting at the stack of papers in smaller black font is “Standard exams place unnecessary stress on students and do not help them advance as learners and people”. This is on top of a light brown wood like background with a black stripe going across the middle of it and a white box in the middle of the poster. The image of the girl is center stage of this image taking up most of the space leaving little negative space in the poster.
This ad would be publish in the NYC subway stations as posters against the wall. This infers that my intended audience is NYC subway riders. This is a wide range of people this image would meet. The diversity in NYC is one of the most in the United States. This means that my audience would have a wide range of ethnicities, cultures, race, and religion. There are poor and rich people, young and old, artistic, rude or polite. Even though everyone in NYC is very diverse, NYC is one of the most liberal states in the country. Since NYC is so liberal and diverse-which follows a progressive mind set, they are more likely to take such an image as what I am presenting and resonate with it. The hope is that it would propel the ideology that standardized exams are problematic and would push them into action for educational reform.
My visual argument is successful in that it appeals emotionally. It is fair to assume that many New Yorkers believes that education is an important aspect that need to be talked about. After all it is through our educational systems that the children are being fueled with tools to take on the world. Yet though we regularly have debates over education and increase standardized exams more and more students developing anxiety disorders and instead of fostering authentic learning these exams are teach students that the grade matters more than how they get that grade. This means that the educational system is failing them. This argument that I am presenting is using the emotional appeals to my audience. The emotional appeal is about the children and students whom are developing anxiety issues because they believe that they are unable to succeed because their poor performance on exams when in fact it has less to do with their performance and more about how the educational system is failing them.
Since they are more likely with being liberals they would believe in educational equality, and how these students are being stripped of his or her potentials because of this increases requirement of higher test grades to prove the effectiveness of the education. The idea is a call to action, get my audience fire up in order for them to begin to demand better educational reform to help our students and hinder the development of anxiety issues in them.
With the publication of this ad, the hope is that it would compel middle-class Americans to become more involve with our educational system. This is important because these students that are developing these anxiety issues are very young. These students are going to be the back bone in the job markets in a few years and are going to be placed in a more competitive job market. When the pressure is placed onto them, due to not having a quality education that they deserved and developing anxiety issues, they could potential fold and lose a job that they have the potential to do great work with. These exams may be taking away potential doctors and scientist that can find the cure for dieses that pledge the population now. In the long run students that develop these issues are likely to keep it for the rest of his or her life. It is important that our educational system is fostering meaningful learning experiences instead of higher test scores. This will help the students in the long run of his or her life.
Works Cited
http://www.teleognosis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Stressed-student.jpg
Emilia Carlo :3 
