Audio essay by Danielle (WRTG 3020 – Fall 2011)
Rhetorical Rational:
Target Audience: My target audience is my friends, who have helped me through many hard times in my life. My secondary audience is younger women who can relate to these types of experiences.
Purpose: The main purpose of this essay is to tell a personal life experience to people so that they can see that many of people go through similar hard times growing up. Though in the end it also becomes a way to thank my friends for always being there to support me.
Thesis: We all have our own personal stories dealing with gender and sexuality, that have left their mark on us. By keeping that in mind we should feel better aout being open with others.
Rhetorical Strategies: I think that my digital story makes mostly an appeal to pathos. The story being about an emotional time in my childhood by its very nature it an appeal to people’s emotions. I think that there is also an appeal to logic because even though people are listening to my story, they probably have one of their own and are able to relate to mine because of it.
Technology used: Originally I did my first recording in sound recorder, I tried to use an apple headphone microphone to try and get a better sound recording but that actually produced worse sound recording then it was without it.
I did use Audacity for the final draft, and experimented with changing the pitch of my voice. I also tried to get some background audio for my project and played around with looping sounds, but I didn’t like the results. I also did a little bit of clipping here and there to get rid of long bits where I wasn’t speaking, etc.
For my final I tried a better microphone but in the end couldn’t get it to work with my computer, so I ended up using a noise remover tool to try and get rid of as much of the ambient noise that I could. I also did my best to find a good position for my computer and my body and projected my voice as best I could. I think that over all it produced a nice effect
Achievements: I am proud that I became more comfortable editing audio data. Though I had done stuff like that before, it had always been from stuff that had been recorded by someone else, and it was a good experience to start from scratch. If forced me to have to think about how to get good sound quality, and when the ideal quality couldn’t be achieved, how to at least get ride of background noise. I did this by learning how to use noise cancellation.