Hannah F, Nabila Mourad, and Yuli Wang Dr. McLaughlin Multimedia Writing & Rhetoric 21 March 2016
Parietals PSA Companion Paper For our satirical video, we decided to focus on a topic that brings great debate, parietals, in the Notre Dame community. A rule emplaced that limits the visitation hours of the opposite sex from midnight through 9 a.m on week days and 2 am through 9 am on weekends. Parietals are said to “foster the personal and social development of students and respond to the safety, security, and privacy needs of those sharing common living space” as said on the Notre Dame website. The topic would be interesting to explore since students have trouble understanding the value of having a “curfew” or designated spaces that are “24 hour zones” within dorms. However, the direction that we chose to make this critique was by suggesting that parietals should be enforced and should be used for more hours throughout the day. This outlook was inspired by the video that we watched in class “It is Your Fault” that criticized by suggesting that the current restrictions are not enough. The context requires to have some familiarity with the Notre Dame community since parietals are not common throughout universities and our university’s religious affiliation affects it to some extent. We initially started filming following the style of a public service announcement to critique the rule of parietals. For this part, we looked at the PSA
video that talked about the dangers of selfies. In our video, we use pictures of several students together, studying in a common space, seeming to be working well together. However, a narrator appears with a calm, yet informative tone to express the dangers of male/female contact and relationships in the Notre Dame community. Therefore, the purpose of our video is to raise awareness of a current issue, ask students to change their beliefs and attitudes regarding this issue, and providing solutions to make it more effective and safe within our community. The video required dialogue between characters and we focused especially on the male perspective of parietals by making them fear females. Moreover, we focused a lot on using data as facts presented by credible sources to prove our point, compelling the audience into accepting our suggestions and trusting us to foresee the best solutions to these problems. PSAs are common in regard to health and safety issues, which is something that parietals are trying to resolve, therefore, it fits within this category. We chose to channel the modes of exaggeration to make a problem more clear in the eyes of students and administration. Humor is used to point out a problem as indicated by Ziv on his article “The Social Functions of Humor.� The intended audience of the video are both the students at Notre Dame and the administration. Due to their different views regarding parietals. Our satirical video highlights the lack of necessity for parietals by using the current situation as a platform for criticism, which can lead to different reactions. Since the majority of the intended audience of the video is familiar with the topic, thus, accessible to the material presented in the video, the reactions will revolve around mockery because of
the dramatic actions and language used to make a point. However, as our satirical video is not designed to raise a conflict between the university and students, the video exposes students’ attention to the reason that parietals are applied based on the the University’s website. Moreover, the presentation analyzes the lengths that the University does to ensure security amongst the campus. A satire can also help with hoping that the university understands the students’ opinions on this issue by presenting them on how the students see the issue. Also, the university may understand the students’ opinions and even make some changes on the rules that will both serve beneficially to the students and safety of others, even if parietals are used to some degree. By presenting the situation here in Notre Dame, the video attracts people’s attention toward the relationship of the opposite sexes on a bigger scale of male and female interaction. Through mocking scenes about why parietals are necessary on campus, the video hopes to have the audience not only laugh at seeing the men frightened by the woman coming around the corner, but also think about the value of parietals and analyze if it positively affects our community. We heavily rely on the use of rhetoric to provide persuasive arguments that will motivate the reader into accepting our claims as it mentioned by Herrick in “An Overview of Rhetoric” that these devices can be used to shape the response of our viewers. Both rhetoric and persuasion are deeply intertwined and we are trying to find different images and methods, which incorporate our claims, persuading the audience to believe that parietals control all aspects of our daily life. However, it is dangerous
if the audience is not familiar with the context of the situation or does not understand how parietals works at Notre Dame. The video is satirical because it questions the purpose of the University attempting to limit students’ time with the opposite gender, which is a topic that may frustrate students, though in its nature, is also humorous. The rhetorical discourse contains five different characteristics: “planned, adapted to an audience, shaped by human motives, responsive to a situation, and persuasionseeking” (Herrick). All these features are found in the satirical video as the frame used only shows the negative aspects of parietals, which is not in a normal context. Moreover, it is adapted to the Notre Dame audience because it is an unique feature that the university has and it is shaped by motives of ensuring security on campus. Lastly, it is persuasive because of the exaggeration used to make the point, while the responses will vary based on age group and relationship to the University.
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Article “An Overview of Rhetoric” is also closely related to Lloyd F. Bitzer’s article “ The Rhetorical Situation” as he points that “it is clear also that a rhetorical audience must be distinguished from a body of mere hearers or readers: properly speaking, a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable to being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (Bitzer 8). The audience is extremely selective because it is not found in most universities and for the purposes of being persuaded by the satirical video, one must understand the context of the university. Other forms of rhetoric are used in the film as well. In the production of the video, we decided to incorporate a number of cinematic techniques. These strategies include long pans and prolonged shots, which add to the video’s intensity. According
to “The Rhetoric of the Frame” by Judith Lancioni, prolonged camera shots cause delayed recognition, which “highlights the sense-making activity itself and obliges us to reflect on it” (105). During the long head shots of each of the parietal-breaking “victims”, the audience is forced to reflect on the meaning of the slow camera shot, along with the significance of the video as a whole. Similarly, we used slow panning shots at the end of scenes to causing the audience to think about the video’s significance. Our video focuses on elements of satire to criticize the purpose of parietals, which is a debated issue at Notre Dame. With an intended audience of members of the Notre Dame community, we are able to explore the matters in a more critical depth because of the viewers are aware of the context of parietals. Lastly, by having a selective frame of highlighting the disasters that are associated with parietals, we are able to manipulate the evidence to align with our persuasive arguments that criticize the claims used for parietals being necessary.