AroundCampus.com Blog
Context
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AroundCampus Group is trying to expand their reach across the nation, so they
have been attempting to go digital these past few years. One deliverable they have
succeeded in creating is their AroundCampus blog, which is a Buzzfeed style site
targeted at college students in America. The site has sections titled Daily Lists,
Entertainment, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, Work Hard and Your Campus. I was
tasked with creating content for this blog on one slow morning and the article below
is one example of such content.
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Rhetorical Considerations
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When creating content for this website, I had a leg up because I was a part of the target audience: college students across the United States. It was easy for me to understand what people would want to read or learn about because I myself was a college student in the United States. It being summertime, I wanted to also create something that was relevant to the season, an appeal to kairos. At the time I had been thinking about how beauty standards had changed so much over the years. In the ancient time, men and women in ancient Greece would put lead all over their faces to make themselves look whiter and more pure. However, now men and women stop at nothing to make their skin look as dark as possible. This means going to tanning salons or even forgoing sunscreen when sunbathing outdoors. Because of the season and the mindset of college students these days, I decided to discuss the importance of sunscreen for one's health and beauty.
In order to write this article I had to do a little research into the science behind how sunscreen works. Some of this research was very technical, so when actually writing the piece for the website, I had to make decisions about the language I was using. People reading the site are not looking to decipher difficult sentence structures and look up words they don't recognize. Therefore, I had to create a fun yet informative style and use vocabulary that college students could easily get through.
Evaluation
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The importance of kairos is something that some people can't quite grasp even though it is basically all about timing. If I were to publish this article during the winter time, it would not have as much of an effect on readers as it would during the summer. I also wouldn't want to write something about the effects of cold weather during the summer because it wouldn't be read by as many people. It is important to consider the timing of a discourse in order for it to be effective. I believe my training in rhetoric has prepared me for understanding contexts and timing discourses for specific times and circumstances.
