Keepin Up With Cynthia: Rhetorical Analysis of Project 3

A rhetorical investigation in the pre-production of project 3.

Author:

For this project, there are a number of different topics I could potentially delve into. For one, my area of study is political science and Middle Eastern studies, so I could always pick from a number of controversial topics out of those. Additionally, I am currently in ROTC on track to become a Naval officer in the next two years, so topics and controversies concerning the military always peak my interest.

I was raised in your average white American, middle-class family. I pretty much grew up in the suburbs and attended good public schools. I come from a large family of six kids in total and we were all raised with pretty sound, maybe a little school-type set of values.

Audience:

I want my audience to be young men and women that are just coming into the work force and will be most impacted by the present political climate and current issues in the US and around the world.
Unfortunately, this audience may know some about one of my topics, but probably not all. Young people typically like to have an opinion without having all of the information, and that is becoming increasingly more common. So currently, they may have a skewed idea of what's happening.
Some may be surprised by my argument, especially if I choose the topic about women in combat since I hold a different opinion on the topic than the majority of young women.
My biggest way of relating to my audience will be identifying myself with them as just another young adult, concerned with the present state of the world we will be entering upon graduation.
A perfect target audience of mine could be those in ROTC with me, or those that I study Arabic and the Middle East with. For them, I would argue the presence of the US in the Middle East and the world impact it has.

Purpose/Message:

I want my audience to consider the political and social climate they will be entering into upon graduation and joining as young new assets to the work force. I especially want young women to pay attention to this that may be considering a career in Hollywood, or something similar.
The biggest thing that needs to be pointed out and explained about this issue is that this issue persists especially in Hollywood. It has essentially been removed from the public sector, and is slowly waning out of the private sector, though it still persists in some professions. The largest presence of this issue persists in Hollywood.

The main info I still need to gather is the opinion from the producers of Hollywood and those in charge of pay for actors and actresses and get their perspectives.

Context:

I will be working with the video essay for this project. I decided on this one because a lot of my sources are coming from video sources and therefore making a video essay just makes sense.

I actually pretty confident with this genre as I have had to make a lot of video projects in the past and I some how always ended up being the one that had to edit at the end.
Since this project will be related to Hollywood, I think it will also be fun to include the conventions of music and video sources/gifs into my video.

This problem has persisted throughout history, so it will definitely be important to include how this problem has evolved over the years and when and where it started if possible.
Especially recently, this problem has been all over the media and there have been a lot of celebrities talking about this:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/02/23/gender_wage_gap_in_hollywood_it_s_very_very_wide.html
http://thefederalist.com/2015/02/23/we-dont-have-a-wage-gap-problem-but-hollywood-and-the-white-house-do/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1qk_Be5yRw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA2MhigYsRw

Keepin Up With Cynthia