It Can Wait Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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The telephone service provider, AT&T, developed a four-minute-long advertisement, It Can Wait, outlining the consequences and realities of texting and driving. AT&T’s purpose for this advertisement, or public service announcement, was to establish awareness to anyone who has the ability to text and drive. By making a real-world connection, the public service announcement portrays horror and authenticity through the use of tone, imagery, and pathos to really be able to reach their target audience and guarantee their respective realization. Throughout the commercial, tone plays a major role in establishing the mood of the commercial itself. Towards the beginning, the mother to her child, the man to his wife, and the daughter to her father, …show more content…

The video, which features a little boy with his bike on the bridge and a little girl talking to her mother, starts off giving off an impression of innocence and naivenéss. However, there is a huge turn in events when the vehicles crash, the innocence and naiveness of before is gone, and soon distress sets in. When scenes such as the glass shattering and the people in the vehicles flipping over are shown, the entire mood of the ad changes from relaxed and laid-back to severe and tense. At the end of this video, AT&T’s tactic of using interchangeable words in the phrase, “No ________ is worth a life,” assists in emphasizing to the audience that there is nothing as important as life. The imagery of the crash and the interchangeable words come together to make the audience be aware that everything shown in the video could happen to anyone of them. AT&T helps viewers grasp the concept of awareness by showing the bona fide consequences of poor decisions, specifically texting and driving. As the cars crash into each other, the advertisement shows the faces of horror from six members of the neighborhood the audience was introduced to earlier in the ad. Each and every face portrays looks of absolute horror, fright, and alarm. Every one of those six faces had either just been part of or witnessed a crash that would