Rhetoric, Media, and Civic Life: Commons Campaign- Get Fit Matt Pritchard

Matt Pritchard

Comm 250

Commons Campaign

For the Commons Campaign, I have decided to put all of my effort into the topic of Health and Physical Health. As you well know, America is known for being one of the most obese nations in the world and for that reason it should be a topic that people are aware of. I believe that personal health should be a bigger priority in most Americans lives. According to CNN.com, roughly one-third of adults in the United States are considered obese (cnn.com, CNN-library). This number is far too high, and I think that the best way to decrease that number is through education. The time to educate people on this epidemic needs to start now.

There are some set backs I may run into during this campaign. First, this is a very sensitive topic for many people because obesity can be caused not only by poor eating and exercising habits, in recent years; doctors believe it to be a disease. Whichever case someone believes, no one ever said that eating healthy and getting good exercise was the cause for obesity or poor health! Obesity does not have to be your motivation for living a healthy and fit life. The increase in energy and overall level of happiness should be enough to get you motivated. With that being said, this campaign is to motivate people to be happy with themselves and feel great too. I hope to educate people on how easy it is to sustain a higher standard of living by living a healthy and active life.

In terms of the rhetorical cannons, first, I needed to brainstorm exactly what I wanted to do with the Campaign. After a few days of thinking about causes I felt personally attached to and came up with Personal Health/Physical Health. However, people have been told to be healthy their entire lives, so why would they listen to me? Well not only has eating healthy and exercising changed my life but it has changed millions of lives. I plan to approach this topic on a fairly small scale at first and hope it can grow. First, I plan on getting my apartment building involved in my Campaign by means of pamphlets and flyers. I will also create a Facebook page called “Get Fit”, where I plan to post links to different workout routines, eating regimens and possibly stories of how a healthy lifestyle changed peoples lives.

I believe that the best stylistic element I can initially draw from would be to show evidence. By evidence, I mean, the stories of different peoples lives that were changed by committing to healthy eating habits and becoming an active person. Showing people evidence of it’s effect on an actual persons life is the best way to appeal to a humans emotions. As a human being, we base most of our decisions on how we feel emotionally in the situation. This is why by getting people to feel emotionally invested or involved in the Campaign, they will feel motivated to start or maintain a healthy life.

I hope to deliver my message, at first, through pamphlets and flyers in a single residence building to try and get some peoples attention. After, I will attempt to appeal to people’s emotions through a Facebook page. The Internet is a beautiful place where college students spend most of their time, which could present a great opportunity to deliver my message. The only uncertainty I have about the Facebook page is that Facebook itself may have already started to become less popular than Twitter or other forms of media.

For this campaign, I will be working by myself and as a result I will be doing all of the labor. I will type out the reflection paper at the end and create all of the mediums of delivery for the “Get Fit” Campaign. Although I am the only member, this is a topic I feel passionate about and am looking forward to getting started.

Matt Pritchard

Commons Campaign

Reflection

Throughout the past six weeks I have been involved in a Campaign to motivate people to live a healthy life and take advantage of the resources available to them. As a student of UNL we are given a number of resources that often go taken for granted. One of those resources is the Campus Recreation Center, where they have a brand new workout facility and dozens of different classes or personal training sessions for people. They have different nutrition classes where they break down eating habits and can give never-ending advice on how to enact a healthy lifestyle one step at a time. Not only have I encouraged people to check out the Campus Recreation Center, but also in my apartment building where I began the campaign, we have a fully functional, free gym available just a stones-throw away.

I began by making some flyers and hung them up on our bulletin boards in each of our study rooms that are on each floor of the residence. These flyers were very simple fact-filled flyers that highlighted a couple key points about obesity and how healthy eating habits can improve your life. On these flyers I also advertised my Facebook page where I linked different workouts, diets and stories of peoples lives that were changed by being healthy and exercising. After that, I began to create pamphlet with some more information about my cause and put them in each door in the residence and hoped to gain more of a following for my Facebook page. Unfortunately my Facebook page did not turn out as well as I had hoped and my initial fear of Facebook becoming less popular was true.

To complete all of the tasks required for this campaign I had to work diligently, however I think that working alone gave me the freedom to present the audience with my own voice and it became more gratifying that way. Not to say that working with a group would not have allowed me to share my voice, but this way I got to be very free-minded with the whole process and get my point of view out there. If I had to do it again, I would have loved to work with a group on this project because it would have been an entirely different sort of gratifying experience. I think collaborating on a cause or project like this can be a very good experience and it gives the students the medium to be heard.

Although it is tough to start a popular Facebook page at my age, I would still have used that form of communication for this project had I done it again. I still believe that it give you a good way to share stories and connect people with each other. Facebook may not be very popular for college students but I believe that it has become very popular for an older population. Which present a good opportunity to get your message to those parents that are able to instill a healthy lifestyle in their children, which is at the core of my message. The best way to combat unhealthy habits is to instill healthy ones in children at a young age. Getting children involved in sports and encouraging them to get outside is an integral part of a child’s healthy development.