Kylie Armstrong
Professor Peeples
English 110
14 October 2021
Rhetorical Situation of Students 4 Support Advertisement
Fig. 1 Students 4 Support advertisement. Source: College of Charleston
Walking through a college campus, students are constantly bombarded with messages right and left of opportunities to get engaged with clubs, organizations, and helpful tools to navigate them successfully through college. Within the College of Charleston campus, there are many chalkboard signs advertising different school programs and organizations offered to students, including an advertisement for Students 4 Support. Students 4 Support, a group of trained students who offer mental health help for peers, created an advertisement board that utilizes Harry Styles’ album Fine Line to promote mental health. The board displays a hand-drawn version of Harry’s album cover, along with a play on words of his song “Treat People with Kindness”: “treat yourself with kindness”, to convey the importance of self love and healthy mental health habits. While promoting this important campus program, the sign is also a rhetorical text responding to a “rhetorical situation”, as described by Lloyd F. Bitzer.
The rhetorical situation as theorized by Lloyd F. Bitzer sets the stage for any discourse, and it shapes the way that a text conveys a message. In his essay Bitzer explains “When I ask, What is a rhetorical situation?, I want to know the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse” (1). Every text is molded by certain circumstances that require a response from a particular audience. As Bitzer terms it, the rhetorical situation consists of en exigence, audience, and constraints. The exigence is “an imperfection marked by urgency” that prompts a text to be created (Bitzer 6). The audience describes the readers/listeners of a text that have the ability to be influenced by the message and respond to the situation, not just anyone who encounters the text. Finally, Bitzer notes that rhetorical constraints consist of “persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (8). The Students 4 Support advertisement board displayed on the College of Charleston campus is a response to a rhetorical situation comprising all three constituents: exigence, audience, and constraints.
Fig. 2 Results from McGill PSC studies. Source: Suresh
In the case of the Students 4 Support sign, the exigence that prompts the sign is that many college students struggle with mental health and need support systems. Even in a normal year anxiety and depression are issues that many college students deal with while adjusting to a new lifestyle, but with the addition of Covid-19 stressors the situation has only gotten worse. Jane Cooley Fruehwirth, Siddhartha Biswas, and Krista M. Perreira, in their article about the stress Covid-19 has put on first-year college students, explore the impacts on the mental health of students at UNC Chapel Hill. They suggest that “general difficulties associated with distanced learning and social isolation contributed to the increases in both depression and anxiety symptoms” and all universities should provide resources to help their students navigate these times (Fruehwirth 1). Students 4 Support is aiming to provide college students with a free, safe environment to talk through some of these issues students may be experiencing, with highly trained, upperclassmen volunteers that have gone through similar situations. They are available in person, on campus, and they have an option for students to confidentially text with a S4S volunteer if they feel more comfortable talking digitally. Students may not feel comfortable discussing their worries about school and mental health concerns in a professional setting, so Students 4 Support would be a good alternative.A study done about a very similar program called Peer Support Centre at McGill University in Quebec, claims that “individuals from ages 15 to 24 in Canada are the least likely age group to seek aid for their mental health in the form of professional services, despite being the most affected by mental illness” (Suresh 1). The graphs from the McGill University Studies display the answers from students involved with the Peer Support Centre (PSC) about their use of professional mental health services, as well as how they compare it to PSC. Some of the reasons that adolescents and young adults are reluctant to ask for professional help can include the cost, lack of time, and the stigma surrounding mental health concerns; this encourages college programs like these to try to create a better solution for students. On the College of Charleston website, they demonstrate that they understand these difficulties and that Students 4 Support is specifically designed because “many people find that it is more comfortable to talk to in a relaxed setting” (Students 4 Support).
Fig. 3 Downloadable image available to fans. Source: Do You Know Who You Are
Harry Styles is a good choice to represent Students 4 Support because his brand portrays a message of kindness and self love to all his fans. One of his most popular songs called “Treat People With Kindness”, (which is also his motto) intends to promote acceptance and equality of all people no matter what their gender, sexuality, race, etc. Harry encourages people to choose love everyday and the acronym TPWK is found on most of his merchandise and promotions (Styles, Treat). As Harry was releasing his new album Fine Line in 2019 he created a website for his fans that went along with his single “Lights Up”. It allowed fans to enter their name and a compliment would be generated for them. These compliments all signed “TPWK. Love, H”, allowed Harry to make a connection with his fans which intended to validate their feelings and uplift them (Styles, Do). Harry Styles and Students 4 Support share some of the same values and they both encourage others to value mental health and self love, which makes Harry Styles a good subject for the S4S advertisement.
As a rhetorical text, the Students 4 Support sign is addressed to an audience that can be influenced by this advertisement. In this situation, any student at the College of Charleston would be included in the audience because they could come across the sign on campus and would be able to use the Students 4 Support service. Students 4 Support is a program run by upperclassmen, but it is available to any students who want someone to talk to about stress from “relationships, family problems, changing habits, roommate issues, and academic pressures” (Students 4 Support). A more narrow audience that this advertisement draws in are students that are fans of Harry Styles. Walking by this chalkboard sign on the way to class, it may be missed by a lot of students, but the art has the ability to catch the attention of any Harry Styles fans. Not all of the students at the College of Charleston are fans of Harry, which limits the range of the audience that could connect with this advertisement. Students that aren’t interested in Harry Styles or his music, may recognize the art as his album cover, however the message won’t be as meaningful to them and they won’t appreciate the advertisement in the same way. This restricts the message of the text, and becomes a constraint of the rhetorical situation.
Many constraints limit the content of the Students 4 Support advertisement based on the format and context of the sign. First, within the limited space, the sign must include the contact information for Students 4 Support in order for College of Charleston students to be able to get into contact with the program and get mental health help. At the bottom of the advertisement a number to text and an instagram handle were provided in order for students to learn more about the program and sign up to text with a S4S volunteer. Also, because Students 4 Support is a college program and the sign is displayed on campus, the creator of the text had to follow any guidelines provided for what is and isn’t allowed to be exhibited at the school. This constrains the contents of the text to anything school appropriate that also follows the values of Students 4 Support. Using Harry Styles and his message of self love as the subject of this advertisement fits these limitations and attracts students to the advertisement. As many Harry Styles fans would know, he often presents the message that mental health is important and should be a priority, therefore this is a good subject for S4S to use because he reinforces their mission.
The Students 4 Support advertisement is a multimodal text that incorporates many forms of communication. Not only does the rhetorical text include the linguistic mode with the words on the sign, but it also includes images. The visual mode including the drawing and colors on the chalkboard are an important affordance in creating the rhetorical situation because they attract an audience while also constraining the contents of the advertisement. The creator of the text’s drawing ability impacts the way that the audience receives the message, because if the image of Harry Styles’ album Fine Line wasn’t well drawn, the connection to the words “treat yourself with kindness” would be lost. The bold colors and drawings on the sign are what typically draw the attention of students walking by on campus, and they help convey Students 4 Support’s message. The media of this message being on a chalkboard also affects the message of the text, because the hand-drawn images give a homemade feel to the sign which can appeal to the audience in a comforting way. The chalkboard format makes students think about the fact that someone else had to create this by hand, because it is different from the mass produced posters and signs displayed around campus. This is fitting for an advertisement of Students 4 Support because it appears less professional, and S4S is aiming to be a more comfortable and relaxed setting for students to discuss their mental health.
The Students 4 Support advertisement is an effective response to the rhetorical situation because it successfully addresses the exigence, audience, and constraints. The message “treat yourself with kindness” paired with a reference to Harry Styles conveys the importance of self love and seeking mental health help. The reason that this text is needed is to show students that there are tools on campus that they can use in place of mental health professionals and still be able to talk to someone confidentially. Anxiety and depression are major issues for adolescents and young adults adjusting to college, especially with the addition of Covid-19 stress, and it is essential for students to have an outlet for these worries. The Student 4 Support advertisement effectively draws the attention of students on campus that are Harry Styles fans, but it has the potential to miss the rest of the audience if they don’t know the album Fine Line or Harry’s motto “Treat People With Kindness”. However, the creator of the advertisement did a really good job creating the visuals and connecting the values of S4S to Harry’s motto all within a limited space.
Works Cited
Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 25, 1992, pp. 1–14. JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.nuncio.cofc.edu/stable/40237697?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 20 Sept. 2021
Fruehwirth, Jane Cooley, et al. “The Covid-19 Pandemic and Mental Health of First-Year College Students: Examining the Effect of Covid-19 Stressors Using Longitudinal Data.” Academic Search Complete, 5 Mar. 2021, Accessed 30 Sept. 2021.
“Students 4 Support Focused on Helping Students via Text.” The College Today, College of Charleston, 1 Apr. 2020, https://today.cofc.edu/2020/03/20/students-4-support-focused-on-helping-students-via-text/.
Styles, Harry. “Do You Know Who You Are?”. Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment. DYKWYA, https://doyouknowwhoyouare.com/.
Styles, Harry. “Treat People with Kindness”. Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment, https://hstyles.co.uk/tpwk.
Suresh, Rahul, et al. “Program Evaluation of a Student-Led Peer Support Service at a Canadian University.” Academic Search Complete, 31 May 2021, https://ijmhs.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13033-021-00479-7. Accessed 30 Sept. 2021.