My Composition in Two Genres felt different from writing a traditional essay because it seemed to focus more on the imagery we decided to use and very concise language. It felt like creating a teaser for the research paper we wrote prior. Unlike traditional essays, I found myself condensing a lot of the information I had instead of expanding on it. I also had to pay attention to hierarchy. The largest text or the largest image, would be seen first and had to grab my audience’s attention. For my subway ad, I had to choose words that had a direct impact to my target audience, and for my Twitter ad, the images were the largest on the screen so they had to be familiar to the demographic I was trying to reach on that platform. 

I knew that I wanted to reach both the parents and the children of these divorced families. In order to reach the parents, I went with a subway ad because I knew that most parents commute in order to go to work. On that commute they have the time to read as they wait for their stop, so I included a short list of information, and contact information if they wanted to learn more. To reach the children of these divorced families, I decided to use social media and went with Twitter because I believe that this platform creates posts that are easiest to spread. With one tap, these children can retweet this ad to help it reach a larger audience.

For both of these genres I used pathos by using images that appealed to the viewer’s emotions. For the subway ad, I used the silhouette image of a divorced couple each taking the hand of their child and pulling in opposite directions, while their child is in the middle ripped apart. This can cause the audience to feel sadness towards the child. Since it is a silhouette, the audience, if they are divorced or know of a divorced couple, can imagine themselves or those people instead of the silhouette, making the imagery even more effective. For the meme, I used two images that side by side are meant to be humorous. The left image evokes pity because the person in it is crying. However, when it is placed next to the image on the right where it shows a person looking very confused, it creates a more light-hearted humorous tone that is easier to share.

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