Cai Rong Li

Profesor Rice-Evans

ENGL 110

For this rhetorical analysis assignment, I choose to write about the automotive company, Tesla. Tesla is an automotive company that only sells electric vehicles and related products such as solar panels & solar roofs. Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, often post on Twitter to communicate with the public. One of his posts about Tesla stated “Tesla does not advertise or pay for endorsements. Instead, we use that money to make the product great”. This may just be a short Twitter post but Elon Musk is able to use ethos, logos, and kairos present Tesla as a great company. Elon Musk used ethos by stating facts about his company. We don’t see Tesla commercials on videos or advisements on the street because Tesla spends nothing on their advisement. However, we still heard of Tesla at some point due to its huge influence in the current automotive market. In addition, Elon Musk used logos to further persuade Tesla’s potential customers to purchase Tesla vehicles. Since Tesla doesn’t spend any money on advertisements, people will begin to wonder how Tesla become so famous and sold out most quantity of electric vehicles every year. Musk’s use of logos will directly lead the audience, potential customers, to think that Tesla vehicles are top quality and it is worth it to purchase one of their models. Furthermore, the use of kairos helps Elon Musk reach his message to the audience. For example, he made Tesla follow a direct-to-consumer model, which sells their vehicles at the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP). Ever since the pandemic, car dealerships sell vehicles way above the MSRP so they can gain more profit from the customers. Therefore, the rhetorical strategy, kairos, that Elon Musk used matches the messages that he is trying to audiences. After people see that Tesla is a trustworthy company, they will eventually make their decision to purchase Tesla vehicles which eventually leads to Tesla being the automotive company that sold out the most electric vehicles every year.

Cover Letter

For this assignment, we are asked to identify and analyze rhetorical strategies that we had seen before. For this assignment, my audience will be my professor and my classmate. The reason for writing this assignment is to break down the advertisements to see and understand their components and analyze what makes them persuasive and therefore make my audience understand the strategies more. Hence, in this assignment, I used a lot of simple terms and define the components of rhetorical strategies.

One of the rhetoric that I have seen is an advertisement about bubble tea. Let’s explain what bubble tea is in case somebody doesn’t know, bubble tea can be considered a drink mixed with milk, sugar, and tea is a famous drink in China. And the ad about bubble tea is on the Chinese version of TikTok called “douyin”, as known, TikTok is a short video app, so this ad must have a very attractive headline or slogan and content that makes people have the patience to watch the ad and will remember it. So this sponsored video is basically a drama that talks about the autumn season coming, a girl is walking on the road, rubbing her hands because she was freezing, and suddenly her boyfriend comes out from her back, holding her hand, and gives her as warm bubble tea to warm her hand, the video at this time is about to end, at the last scene, a slogan comes out. Saying “ the first cup of bubble tea in the fall”. And after 12 hrs, this ad went on fire and it became very trending on TikTok, during that time period, basically, in every three videos, one video is about bubble tea. But to be honest, I actually couldn’t get the point of it because I realized it was an advertisement from those bubble tea facilities. They are combining bubble tea with the love of a couple, just the diamond strategy. The exigence of this case is your girlfriend is freezing. The audience then will be those couples because the girls want the boys to buy them bubble tea to show how much he loves them. The constraint is just the limiting of time since it was posted on TikTok, and the reason why they posted it here is also to facilitate the audience since usually, young people will care about this stuff and TikTok was mostly for young people that are using.