Barbara Paulino
Professor Clifton Justice
ENGL 102 - 08
Fall 2014
Write Smrt Smrt English is a channel on YouTube aimed at helping students become better writer. At glance, the site is easy to use. It is YouTube afterall. It is easily accessible and many of the people going unto the channel already know how to use it. It is a great way to help struggling students better themselves in their writing. In making a Youtube channel, these people automatically opened themselves up to the million of people who use YouTube everyday. In her article, Backpacks vs. Briefcases, Carroll brings up several questions one has to ask in order to analyze it. First she says to ask “Does the rhetoric address the problem it claims to address?”(Carroll, 57). In…show more content… The intended audience for the channel is students who want to learn how to write better. The students who are watching the videos are trying to change how they write. So, the audience does have the power to make change. The appeals of the rhetoric is another question Carroll address. The three appeals are logos,pathos, and ethos. Ethos is the Credibility of the piece. Pathos means persuading by appealing to the reader's emotions. Logos means persuading by the use of reasoning. The YouTube channel tends to lean more toward the logos side, dishing out information about the topic they are covering in a particular videos. But it could be argued that the ethos and pathos come into play.The narrator of the videos is a man in glasses and sensible clothes. When looked at without context, it could be assumed that the person is smart and knowledgeable, ethos. Pathos comes into play when the narrator relates the lessons to what the audience could be going through at a particular moment (Carroll, 52). Like in their unity video the narrator says that taking too many college courses will result in the students becoming…show more content… The channels main goal is to inform students on how to better improve their writing skills. With the many videos they have on their YouTube channels, it is true that it has enough information to make an informed decision. This information, however does not attempt to manipulate the audience, the fifth question by Carroll. Some negative effects that the rhetoric may have can be that the students who view the material misinterpret the information, as comes when the information is made public. Despite the information distributed in a way that would seem simple to some, it does not take the place of someone explaining it to you. People who know the problems you face in