SEBASTIAN URIBE

SUBJECT: BROCHURE MEMO

According to the RWS E-book, this accompaniment of the brochure has two purposes: it reinforces my familiarity with writing a memo and it encourages me to reflect on the rhetorical choices. This memo will provide some context regarding the theme of my brochure as well as discussing the problems I encountered while organizing, and the role that my discourse conventions and audience played. It will also discuss the most challenging part of the project for me, my systematic approach, the most effective aspect of the brochure, and finally this memo will address the reasoning behind my design decisions.

 

Control of the U.S. Senate

Present day, I am a freshman RWS researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso that will graduate with a major in Political Science and a minor in Business. I picked Political Science as my major because in the future I plan to attend law school and become a successful attorney of law, hence learning about the government and how it works will be a sharp tool. I went to Dr. Webking, Political Science Advisor, and he gave me a few controversial topics and which led me to my topic.

 

Rhetorical Choices

A conflict I encountered when organizing and writing my brochure was balancing the information and the pictures. I had too much information, hence I decided to erase it, be concise and include pictures in most of my panels to keep my audience engaged. The most significant discourse conventions were: the use of active voice and informal writing. The active voice convention made me change my writing to impact. The informal language convention was more complex because it had to be written in a way that it was informal enough to connect with the audience but yet professional to establish credibility. The most challenging part of the brochure was the focus because my semester topic is the political parties having the majority in the Senate after the congressional elections, which took place in the 4th of November. The problem was that my information was in a way outdated since the elections had already taken place, and I wanted my brochure to be accurate and also unbiased; hence, I had to decide on a focus that would still be up to date and reliable from the to sources I had. My systematic approach was organized in chronological order. I started with the 1st panel and came up with the tag line that would get the readers interested in my brochure; then I moved on to the picture; and finally after all the information met the standards for the panel I did the design which included the colors, the special effects on the pictures and text boxes, etc. I repeated the process for every panel; I started with the information and then did the design. I wouldn’t say that only one aspect of my brochure was most effective because I worked on it until everything looked exceptional to me, hence everything is effective from my perspective. I made my design decisions based on the connection to my topic, the videos on the hybrid, and the examples from the supplemental guidelines. For example, I chose red, blue and white because they represent the colors of the elections and they are attention grabbers.

 

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