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Beighley Thornock
Ms. Ingram
UWRT 1104-034
5 November 2016
Rhetorical Analysis
The audience I have for my multi-genre project was college students. I chose this
audience because it was the narrowest one I could get to and know how to make an impactful
impression on. Originally, I was going to focus on students and staff of academic institutions,
but when I narrowed in to just the college level, it made the creating of my message easier. The
purpose of this project was to inform students on procrastination and get them to stop this
harmful habit. I chose this specific purpose because it is something that many college students
relate to and struggle with, so I thought it would make a great impact if I created my message
toward it.
The sources I used to fulfill this purpose were Tim Urban, Joseph Ferrari, and
Schouwenburg. Urban gave a TED Talk speech, which I included a link to in the infographic. It
was basically the same as his article, almost word for word in some cases. This behavior
reached caricature levels she. I always unable to start writing my 90-page senior thesis until 72
hours before it was due, an experience that ended with me in the campus doctors office (Urban,
2016). While the original sources may be Burka and Yuen, the thoughts of a procrastinator
actually came from Ferraris book. Some of these thoughts include I must be perfect or
Everything I do should go easy and without effort (Ferrari, 1995). It was in Schouwenburgs
book that I found different causes for procrastination such as fear of failure or success

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(Schouwenburg, 2004). If it were not for these, I would not have anything to create an
infographic with.
I decided to go with two more unconventional genres: A to do list and and infographic. I
thought that these would be more suitable, especially the infographic, for a world full of mobile
technology. These genres would exists solely through the internet and my audience would be
able to initally gain access to them through various forms of social media. Although the genres
could probably be read in any order, I prefer to see the to do list first and then the infographic
because the infographic does a good job of summing up everything my topic is about.
The mode of communication I relied on the most was either spatial mode or textual
mode. I relied on textual mode to get my point across in a clear, concise way because there is
not much time that one can spend reading a list or looking at an infographic. So, textual mode
helped me communicate my point the most. Spatial mode is more where I get the smoothness
and speed of communicating my message to the audience. I had to organize everything in a way
that made sense, but also flowed in order to make everything easy for the reader to get through
and understand. Overall, I think these two were at the same level and there is no way I would
have achieved creating my message without these modes of communication.
While I never really thought about it as I was going through the project, I used ethos,
pathos, and logos in my genres. Ethos was used in my link of procrastination interpreted by a
procrastinator in the infographic. It appeals ethically because the source is trustworthy since
they have actually gone through the experience themself. Pathos was all over the to do list. This
genre appealed to emotions of the audience because they can immediately relate to certain things
on the list like go see that awesome new movie or clean room. This helped establish that

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connection to help get my point across in the following genre: The infographic. The use of the
procrastination cycle in the infographic was a more logical flow of information, therefore
creating an example of logos. As far as kairos is concerned, college students need to know how
to stop procrastination more than ever because of the growing demand for academic success.
Overall, I think that my genre pieces would be very successful with my target audience.
In this day and age, it is so easy to stumble across an image or interesting infographic on ones
social media feed. I think this would help get my message out and spread it fast across the
world. The genre pieces connect more with the audience because they can be found in the place
they know best: The internet.

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Works Cited
Ferrari, Joseph R., Judith Johnson, and William George. McCown. Procrastination and Task
Avoidance: Theory, Research, and Treatment. New York: Plenum, 1995. Print.
Schouwenburg, Henri C. Counseling the Procrastinator in Academic Settings. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, 2004. Print.
Urban, Tim. "Why Procrastinators Procrastinate." Wait But Why. 14 May 2016. Web. 06 Oct.
2016.