Advocacy Assignment WIP

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This is a draft of my advocacy project for next week. My persuasive essay was on taxation of junk/fast foods and I considered my audience to be government officials who could implement the tax. For the advocacy assignment I wanted to generalize my audience to any the general public and therefore decided to make a flyer-like visual. The purpose of the visual is to prompt people to go online and sign a petition in favor of taxing junk/fast foods.

In order to advocate my feelings towards such foods I used McDonald’s for my visual. The point I’m trying to get across is that junk/fast foods used to be a fun, special treat for eager citizens who were happy about these types of foods. However these foods have caused the health conditions our populations from today such as high obesity rates. In order to make my point I displayed an older photo of Ronald McDonald with a bunch of healthy looking kids in the top left-hand corner of the image. The image is lively and everyone is excited about McDonald’s opening (in 1955). Then I draw the viewers’ attention to the bottom right hand corner with a photo of children who are not as fit as the children in the first photo, however, Ronald is just the same smiling character he was in previous picture. Through this imagery I am trying to convince viewers that although McDonald’s hasn’t changed (as evidenced by Ronald McDonald), citizens eating the food have because McDonald’s and junk/fast food in general are risks towards our health. To add more ethos in this flyer I added credible statistics to prove to the audience that obesity rates are high, and that it has been proven that taxation would reduce such health concerns caused by the food.

In the center of the visual I have the word TAX written in all caps and in blue surrounded by the words junk food and fast food in red. I purposefully put the words fast/junk food in red to signal alarm and harm to the audience since most people associated the color red with danger (or the dangerous effects of these foods). I put the word TAX in blue because in Psychology I was taught that people associate that color with tranquility or relaxed emotions. Therefore I found that making the word TAX in blue colored font would suggest to viewers that taxation on junk/fast food would relieve our population of the harmful problems the food generates. Lastly to tie the whole flyer together, I added purpose to the flyer by adding the suggestion at the bottom of the page asking the audience to go online and sign a petition in favor of taxation. Sorry for the long explanation, I just wanted to break down why I did what I did for this assignment. Please let me know if you have any suggestions and let me know if any of what I said above makes sense!

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One Response to Advocacy Assignment WIP

  1. Ahmad Moore says:

    Your flyer looks great! The colors you use to highlight key points do so very effectively and the fonts also are attractive to look at when glacncing at the poster. You did well in making your message positive by showing kids on the poster and at the same time showed a noticeable difference in fast food in 1995 compared to today’s fast food empires.

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