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Purpose: To promote self for public speaking for career counseling to undergraduates
and graduates
Audience: Faculty at undergraduate and graduate schools (potential employers);
Rhetorical appeals:
o Ethos: “With over 20 years of experience…” promotion of self; use of colleagues’
reviews to convince audience that others in her field think highly of her
o Pathos: in the activities section, she likes and comments on other people’s
statuses and posts. By building other people up, she is at the same time creating
an appeal to the reader that she promotes them as well
o Logos: Mentioning of prestigious school and organizations she is a part of to
appeal to logic
o Kairos: This medium is very popular right now as a good way to sell yourself to
employers
Medium: Completely third person, great length to emphasize her expertise and amount
of experience she has. The medium specifically is a website. This site breaks the
information up into different sections and contains social media posts, visuals, and
endorsements and reviews from others.
o Challenges: A challenge of this medium is that the site creates a very lengthy
profile for the reader. Though there is much good information, the site takes
somewhat of a long time to navigate through as there are many different
subsections and dropdown menus.
o Advantages: An advantage of this medium is that the site is very well structured
and keeps everything in a certain order that makes it easy for the reader to
navigate through.
Difference between professional writing versus academic writing on this topic:
o In contrast to academic writing style where the writer is not as focused on being
concise and to the point but rather conveying a certain topic to an audience of a
specific field, this professional writing style is written to a broader range of
readers and it is succinct and brief. The author’s goal in this specific piece of
professional writing is to “promote herself” to her audience. In other words, she
briefly discusses all of her accomplishments in order to persuade the reader to,
for instance, hire her to speak to career counsel their graduates or
undergraduates. Also, the writer uses other forms of rhetoric besides words
including social media posts and visuals to sell herself to her audience. This
differs greatly from academic writing.