Reading Response #5

My argument essay was focused on overpopulation and trying to get people aware of the problem that it has become and the problem that it will be in the near future unless we do something about it. I basically talked about some of the problems that come from overpopulation and then things that we can do to slow down the process because it's basically too late to completely stop it from happening. I talked about how with overpopulation comes the loss of arable and natural land. Because there is an ever-increasing amount of babies being born everyday, we will need to make more houses and living areas for the new families. The land used for the new houses will take up more of the natural land and will give us less land for use in making crops. This means that there will be more people covering more land and less land available to make food for the growing population. This will eventually result in a food shortage. Also with making houses, buildings, and entertainment for the new towns, we cut down a lot of trees to help us build these things. This leads to the overharvesting of timber which destroys more natural land and the natural habitat of the many animals living in the rain forests where they cut down the trees. There really aren't two sides to my argument. You just either realize that its a problem now and try to do something about it or you just ignore that the problem even exists, which is crazy! I posed a few solutions that are decent that will help to slow down the process of overpopulation. One of the ways that I thought of would be to have a limit on the number of children every family can have. I thought about limiting it to only two children per family which seems like a reasonable amount. This will cut down on the amount of space, food, money, and basic needs required per family. I talked about how China was already implementing this and how they are only allowing each family to have one child, two in certain situations. Another way I thought about to slow down overpopulation is to start building up and having more and more apartment complexes built to house new families. There is almost an infinite amount of space to build upwards, but not very much space left to build outwards. If we built up, we could save more land for crops and also save more natural land and preserve habitat. This could also help to make people more social because they are living so close together that they would almost be forced to interact with each other. This would also be a way to help people start using public transportation more often. Because the people would be more social, they would be more comfortable in using public transportation. This would also be more cost effective for everyone, and it would also cut down on the air pollution because it put less carbon emission in the air.

I thought about changing my medium to being a magazine ad that focuses on female teenagers and young adults. I thought about encouraging women to use contraceptives to help with the unwanted baby population control. Witht he current advertising in magazine, billboards, and on tv and with the way that our culture is portraying pleasure and sex, I think society has become more prone to having sex before marriage. I think that a lot of people already use birth control, but I could encourage more people to use it. This would help to cut down on unwanted babies that were either an accident or were caused from a horrible rape victim case. If more people were using birth control, there would be less abortions and less babies put up for adoption. There would just be less babies period which would definitely slow down the process of overpopulation because people wouldn't have babies until they really wanted them which is probably when they get married. I could possibly come up with some snazzy name for a new pill that had only amazing side effects like cutting down on the pain of periods that worked 100% everytime and that had no horrible side effects like increased blood preasure or seizures or death or anything like that. I would have a really interesting looking pill that was either lime green or hot pink and that had a symbol of a baby on it or something interesting that pertained to birth control. As far as my magazine ad would go, it would have a large image of the pill on it, say something quick and simple about birth control, and then a web address to refer young women to our website. I would use bright colors to attract the eyes of young females that are flipping through the magazine and say a phrase just short enough to stick in their heads and to encourage the use on contraceptives.

I actually learned a lot about the rhetorical process. I learned that people don't just sit down and throw an ad together. They actually think a lot about things during the entire production of an ad. They think about what kind of ad it's going to be like a billboard, magazine ad, commercial, etc., who the target audience is going to be like women, men, old people, young couples, children, hungry people, etc., what kind of visual appeals are they going to use like bright and contrasting colors, beautiful women, beer, toys, food, etc., and other things like the type of community its going to focus on as in an urban community, rich community, hick or farmer community, etc. There are so many things to think about when making an ad to try and focus on persuading a certain group of individuals to buy something or to change the way they do things or whatever it is. I never really thought about all of that until we talked about it in class and talked a little bit about it in my art classes. It might be a good thing to know because as of right now I'm a graphic design major.