My origin piece is a paper I wrote in my Political Persuasion class last semester. My group and I had to create a presentation for the class to persuade them that federal election day should be made a federal holiday. The class then had to decide to what extent they were persuaded. This paper is about the rhetorical skills I included in the presentation, and why I thought they would be successful for my audience. Some ideas I touched on in my essay included why I decided to base part of my presentation on a popular televison show, why my group decided to stand the way we did on stage, and why we used statistical data as evidence in our presentation. I also discussed what proved to be successful and what was not successful.

 

I thought this would be an interesting origin piece because many people are currently arguing why federal election day should be made a federal holiday. I wanted to create new ways to express this idea, both through different genres and different persuasion techniques. My goal throughout each experiment was to explore a new genre while also exploring a new persuasion technique. As an aspiring lawyer who one day hopes to persuade people as a career, I am intrigued by how there are so many different persuasion techniques which can all create the same outcome. Additionally, this is a topic that I care greatly about, allowing me to write with strong emotion and passion.

 

The experiment that I decided to make my fully-realized project was my first experiment. I wrote a dystopian short story from the perspective of a college student about what happens to the word in the future if federal election day is never made a federal holiday. The democratic system has fallen and the rich elite rule the county. For my fully-realized project, this short story turned into more of an open letter.