ESPN

For this assignment, I chose to analyze the rhetoric found on ESPN.com. The first thing you notice when you access the sight is the vast amount of activity thrown your way. It has tickers, scores, stories, videos, and a myriad of other things immediately shown to you. It is all very compacted and organized incredibly well, yet there is so much going on that it is hard at first to lock on to one thing. This, of course, was not just mere coincidence. The site includes all of this information for a very specific purpose: to quickly expose you, the reader, to all of the things that the site has to offer right away. With this in mind, you will see several stories or other things that are of interest to you that you will inevitably click on and investigate, therefore spending more time on the site. If they did not add all of this vast information on the home page, there would be a great deal of information that each viewer would not be exposed to and would miss out on reading. This would also obviously cut down the time spent on the website and hurt their revenue. ESPN.com intentionally bombards its readers with so many options so that each reader will read as many possible things as they are interested, and maybe even some that just caught their eye. Another tactic this website employs is that they use very dramatic, sometimes misleading headlines on the home page. On the home page you may run into wild proclamations as titles for stories, however you find something completely different when you actually click on it. These wild headlines have different titles when you actually click on the stories, and sometimes are not nearly as serious as you were led to believe. This is another way that this website is able to draw readers in and cause them to spend more of their time perusing the site. Another way this website uses rhetoric is by incorporating user feedback. On the main page, there are a variety of polls and other questions posed by the site to its fans. This is another very smart business tactic. By incorporating and asking for the fans’ opinions, the readers become more engaged and even more interested. Everyone loves to share their opinions and see what others think as well, so it was very smart of ESPN.com to use this. With people feeling more engaged, they will therefore feel as though ESPN values their opinion and thus like and enjoy ESPN more, along with visiting the site more often.