1. Why does our author state that “rhetoric of the body” is important? What does rhetoric of the body entail? Give a justified answer and then at least 2 quoted examples from the text.
2. In terms of rhetoric study is the body sacred or can it be manipulated? Make sure to defend your answer with evidence from the text.
3. Give 1 current example of how you witness rhetoric of the body.
4. What is gender and how does chapter 7 address it?
5. How does rhetoric interact with gender identity? (Marketing, Digital Media, Prose) 85
7 # Appeals to Gender
Much of the liveliness in human societyalong with much of the ten-
sionarises from differences between men and women. The division of the
sexes certainly doesnt begin in modern timesits as old as Edenbut shift-
ing opportunities for women in modern cultures beget more and more
frequent questions about how much is instinctual and how much is
learnedhow much nature, how much nurturein what people as-
sume about the way men and women operate. Is motherhood, for example,
an instinct or the result of social conditioning? Because such questions
cannot be answered fully by biological science, they fall within the tradi-
tional purview of rhetoric. Again, rhetoric traditionally deals with things
that we argue over, not things that can be settled by clear evidence.1
The physical differences between the sexes and their roles in repro-
duction, which are distinct, obvious, and striking to begin with, tend to be-
come even more pronounced and more complicated when we consider
the ways that societies apply the principles of gender, the categories of mas-
culinity and femininity. People immersed in any given society are likely
to think that the traits and roles normally included in the gender catego-
ries are natural: the man hunts, the woman cares for the children; men
are straightforward and tend to be brutal; women are communal and tend
to be devious; men are from Mars, women from Venusand thats just
the way it is.
But in fact, the categories, traits, and roles shift, sometimes subtly and
sometimes dramatically, as we look across different cultures. Whats con-
sidered masculine behavior in some societiesfarm work, for example
may be undertaken by both men and women in other societies, or perhaps
only by women. An aspect of feminine beauty in one culturesmooth skin,
for examplemay appear as gender-neutral in a second culture, or may be
a matter of something like social class and not a concern of gender at all
in a third culture.
Because of the fluidity of gender, appeals that involve sexual differences
can never be merely categorized as appeals to the body. The very distinc-
tion between sex and gendersex defined as a bodily condition (nature)
and gender defined as the result of social conditioning and training (nur-
ture)is not so easy to sort out as you may think. Investigative journal-
ists have revealed, for example, that hermaphroditism is much more com-
mon among newborns than most people ever knew and that doctors, with
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86 # Appeals to Gender
and without permission of the parents, have been known to correct the
condition, leaving only a nagging confusion to haunt the male or female
patient in later years. Beyond the genitalia, masculine traits, such as broad
shoulders, heavy musculature, and facial hair, and feminine traits, such as
broader hips, pronounced breasts, and sparse body hair, vary widely among
individuals and racial types. Still the categories persist, to be alternately
bolstered and undermined by the practice of rhetoric.
Appeals to time and the questions of modernity also affect the rheto-
ric of gender. People living in modern democracies tend to feel superior
when they regard the practices of cultures that closely monitor the divi-
sion of the sexes and the control of the body. Tribal customs such as fe-
male circumcision and social rules involving womens clothing (veiling and
long dresses that cover the legs) are judged on a scale ranging from un-
conscionably cruel to merely unfair. It is hard to see them otherwise once
the values of liberty and equality come into play. The old patriarchal cul-
tures, in which the power to make decisions and control the key processes
of life belong exclusively to older men, are treated with contempt by most
educated people in modern Western societies. Such social hierarchies ap-
pear as premodern and outmoded in cultures that pride themselves on
allowing men and women to mingle more or less freely in public and make
their own choices about how to display, care for, and share their bodies.
But feminists, along with gay, lesbian, and transsexual activists, often ar-
gue that a fundamental patriarchy still exists in modern cultures beneath
the mask of social tolerance and individual liberty. And even if you dont
subscribe to these political perspectives, it doesnt take much looking around
to see that, no matter how modern the culture, practically everything in the
social landscape remains heavily gendered. In the United States, choices
at every stage of life are shaped by gender categories. The conditioning
begins even before were able to make our own choices. Parents are still
urged to buy pink for girls and blue for boys in baby clothes. The togs for
little boys have trucks, frogs, and bulldog puppies stitched into them; the
girls get little pink flowers, hearts, and fairies. In the next stage of life, toys
divide between beginner baking ovens and baseball bats, baby dolls and
action figures, ballet slippers and BB guns. By adolescence the patterns are
set, and the self-policing and peer pressure begin. Even the brightest and
most self-aware high-school students seem to make choices that divide
neatly along gender lines. Data from standardized tests, for example, re-
veal that young women favor and perform best in courses and on tests in
the humanities and arts, while young men do best in math and science.
This trend has been present from the beginning of such testing and con-
tinues to this day despite the womens movement and scholarship pro-
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grams encouraging girls to cross over into the technical fields. And the divi-
sion certainly doesnt end with the onset of adulthood. We have magazines
for men with a heavy emphasis on sports and magazines for women that
concentrate on fashion. Hollywood markets romantic comedies for women
(chick flicks) and action-adventure shows for men (chase scenes and big
explosions linked together by the thinnest possible plotsdick flicks?).
Entire television networks are devoted to audiences divided by gender.
Such heavy investment in the division of genders raises questions of
personal and political power. Who gets to do what? And what measure of
liberty and equality can you count on? Society has different expectations
of men and women, and how to work within these expectations or slip free
of them often becomes a matter of how you position yourself as a woman
or a man, how you appeal to gender.
To come to terms with this kind of appeal, we might begin by asking
who benefits most from any particular way of defining gender categories
and who pays the price? A quick survey of modern rhetorical practices
leads, not surprisingly, back to the advertisers.
Marketing Gender: Empowered or Exploited?
I remember an ad from the late 1970s or early 1980s. Like many other edu-
cated, middle-class, young professionals in the western world, I was try-
ing in those days to make sense of gender relations under the influence of
the womens movement and the consequent perception of changes in home
and workplace roles. I happened to be writing a book about sexuality in
literature at the time, but I wasnt just studying gender formally; I was also
trying to figure out how to behave as a responsible human being.
The ad pictured a dressed-for-success working woman bursting into the
family home and shouting out a brassy show tune to the accompaniment
of an invisible orchestra. The bluesy style of the music strongly suggested
the atmosphere in a stripper bar. I dont remember the product advertised
and not much of the lyric the woman was belting outonly one line in
fact: I can bring home the bacon, / fry it up in the pan.
The ad had appeal for me, I confess. I realized its general corniness, but
it seemed encouraging and empowering for women. It allowed them a
position in the traditional world of men. The clich of bringing home the
bacon meant, as usual, making money to support the family, but with a
slight twist. The superwoman in the ad could bring it home and fry it up,
absorbing the roles of man and womanbreadwinner and bread-baker
without (and this is important) losing her sex appeal. Indeed, the impli-
cation was that she got even sexier when she got liberated. No longer the
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88 # Appeals to Gender
home-bound drudge, she gave the impression that her liberation brought
with it the freedom to express a tantalizing sexual naughtiness. She com-
bined the intellectual appeal of the smart businesswoman or lawyer, the
comfort of wife and mother, and the raw attraction of the stripper. She
could have it all for herself and still be everything her family and her man
could ever need.
I eventually forgot about the ad, but I was jolted back into remember-
ing it and somewhat embarrassed by its former appeal for me when, in
1989, I encountered a new book called The Second Shift by the Berkeley
sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. The book reported on a long-term
study of couples in which the husband and the wife both worked. The
question was, with both partners working, who covered the housework and
childcare, the second shift of work that every family must account for?
The short answer was that the women did most of the work at home. Sure
enough, they were bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan,
but they didnt feel particularly sexy and empowered. They felt tired, and
some felt exploited.
Hochschild introduces The Second Shift with a reference to the same
kind of advertised image that caught my eye. Chapter 1 begins this way:
She is not the same woman in each magazine advertisement but
she is the same idea. She has that working-mother look as she strides
forward, briefcase in one hand, smiling child in the other. Literally
and figuratively, she is moving ahead. Her hair, if long, tosses behind
her; if it is short, it sweeps back at the sides, suggesting mobility and
progress. There is nothing shy or passive about her. She is confident,
active, liberated. She wears a dark tailored suit, but with a silk bow
or colorful frill that says, Im really feminine underneath. She has
made it in a mans world without sacrificing her femininity. And she
has done this on her own. By some personal miracle, this image sug-
gests, she has managed to combine what 150 years of industrializa-
tion have split wide apartchild and job, frill and suit, female cul-
ture and male.
When I showed a photograph of a supermom like this to the work-
ing mothers I talked to in the course of researching this book, many
responded with an outright laugh. One daycare worker and mother
of two, ages three and five, threw back her head: Ha! Theyve got
to be kidding about her. Look at me, hair a mess, nails jagged, twenty
pounds overweight. Mornings, Im getting my kids dressed, the dog
fed, the lunches made, the shopping list done. That ladys got a maid.
Even working mothers who did have maids couldnt imagine com-
bining work and family in such a carefree way. Do you know what
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a baby does to your life, the two oclock feedings, the four oclock
feedings? . . . They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the
flying hair, but she didnt remind them of anyone they knew. (Hoch-
schild 12)
The advertised image appeals to the desire for enough power to do it all,
to be able to accomplish all that life sets before youand to avoid the hard
choices that life in a modern society puts before you, above all the choice
of how to divide the labor in working families, a decision that has led to
more than one divorce.
Even at the time I first saw the ad, I understood that the appeal was
directed not only to the working woman who longed for sufficient power
to succeed in a double role, but also to the enlightened man, the kind of
person I understood myself to be in the late 1970s. The man wants his wife
to fulfill herself by having a career, but he doesnt want to give up the
wife and mother who takes care of everything at home, leaving him free
to be the principal breadwinner.
Professor Hochschilds rhetorical strategy involves an unmasking of
the ads appeal. As chapter 3 suggests, rhetorical situations always involve
personae, literally masks. The first persona is the author position, the
I, the face put forward to the world. The second persona is the audi-
ence position constructed by the author, the you to whom the perfor-
mance is addressed. In the supermom ads, the producers put forward the
image of the empowered woman, the I that sings, I can bring home the
bacon. I always supposed that the implied you of the ad would be the
overworked housewife or working mother that longs to be like supermom.
Buy our product, the advertiser says indirectly through the agency of su-
permom, and you can be like me.
But the working mothers whose stories appear in The Second Shift arent
buying the image: They envied the apparent ease of the woman with the
flying hair, but she didnt remind them of anyone they knew. They ac-
cept the mask of what I assumed to be the second persona, overworked
and exploited, but they reject the image of supermom as unreal and un-
attainable. She is only an image, a fantasy figure.
The fantasy works in the service of educated men sensitive to the de-
mands of the womens movement but worried about the challenge to their
position. One of the most disturbing findings I remember from Hochschilds
research was that the educated professional men in the study were more
likely than the working-class men to proclaim the need of husbands to share
the housework and childcare with their working wives; but, when it came
to actually chipping in and doing the work, the professional men were, if
anything, less likely to contribute than their working-class counterparts.
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90 # Appeals to Gender
As the old saying goes, they talked the talk but didnt walk the walk. It
was just the opposite with the working-class men.
The irony in this situation turns on the reversal of expectations revealed
in this situation of inequality. This particular appeal depends upon the
creation of not just a first and second persona, an I and you, but also a
third persona: they. The author appeals to the audience by forming an
inner circle of knowledgewhat you and I can see but others are oblivi-
ous to: They dont get it. The force of the irony is directed against the third
persona them. In Hochschilds book, the position of the third persona is
occupied by the professional men who dont hold up their part in the equal
relationship they profess to believeand by the advertisers who support
them. Supermom appears as the advertisers mask, or their puppet. Hoch-
schilds research deflates the farce, revealing the true authors of the ad and
their beneficiariesthem. Her I appeals as a working motherwho tells
her own story in the prefacereaching out to an audience of you other
working mothers who are tired out from trying to live the life that super-
mom supposedly succeeds in, a life that we find too hard to manage.
The irony and unmasking led me to take another look at my mental
image of the old bring home the bacon ad. With new eyes, I could see
that the ad appealed to me by approaching me with a fantasy image. The
sexy composite of working woman, housewife, and stripper said to me, in
effect, Dont you want a woman like me? It could be that men like me
were always the intended second persona, the you of this ad. The sad part
is that the implied third persona was the overworked housewife working
virtually two jobs, a first shift at the store or factory or office and the sec-
ond shift at home. As I watched from the position of observer or distanced
social critic, Professor Hochschild removed the mask of the second and
third personae and exchanged the places, making the overworked house-
wife the you she addressed and treating the neglectful husbands and their
accomplices the advertisers as the third persona. Now it became us against
them, and I found, with some dismay, that the old enlightened version
of myself of the 1970s belonged in the position of them.
The short answer to our question about power, then, is that profes-
sional educated men stand to benefit most from the values and ideology
implied in the appeal of such ads. Working women pay the price, as do
homebound women who continue to perform heavy, sometimes unfulfill-
ing labor in a low-prestige job (often these days receiving a share of con-
tempt from women who do pursue careers outside the home).
But if men stand to get empowered and women exploited by such rheto-
ric, what do the marketers stand to gain? I see two possible explanations.
First, by siding with men of the professional class, they appeal to the group
most likely to control the greatest percentage of the societys capital re-
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sources, the guys with the money to buy the products. Second, and more
subtly, they benefit by perpetuating gender divisions of any kindthe
stronger, the better. It only stands to reason that if products can be divided
by genderif men are likely to make decisions about some products and
women about othersyou can more easily target the market for your ads.
You know its best to advertise cleaning products during soap operas
(hence the name) and trucks and beer during football games. About the
only time you ever see a man cleaning house in an ad, he appears like Mr.
Clean as a fantasy figure who shows up to rescue the housewife in dis-
tress from the burden of her work. In the world projected by advertising
rhetoric, housekeeping remains womens work.
Demystifying the Image: The Appeal to Fulfillment and Health
Many of the ideas and rhetorical strategies found in Hochschilds study were
anticipated in the now classic book The Feminine Mystique, published by
Betty Friedan in 1963. Friedan, who went on to found the National Orga-
nization of Women (NOW) and become a preeminent leader in the Ameri-
can womens movement, offers a powerful example of a technique favored
by modern rhetoric and suggested in our analysis of The Second Shift. Call
it image competition.2
Considering the reputation Friedan earned as a pioneering feminist in
the 1960s, she uses a surprisingly subtle and unthreatening image to set
up a rhetorical situation that turns out to have great power. In her first
chapter, she slowly works her way toward the articulation of an unnamed
problem that gradually comes first into focus in what was then a familiar,
everyday image: a ladies coffee group, which serves as not only the focal
point of the problematic image but also a projection of the books ideal au-
dience. Instead of the expected small talk and gossip, or worries over chil-
dren and husbands, these housewives and mothers are talking about them-
selves. Letting go for once of the ideal of selfless womanhood, the ethos
of wife and mother who sacrifices personal needs for the family, they find
that they share a sense of vague dissatisfaction. Friedan describes their
problem with a famous phrase that Henry David Thoreau applied in Walden
to the lives of most men: quiet desperation. Before the meeting, Friedan
tells us, the women had been saying to themselves, There isnt any problem:
But on an April morning in 1959, I heard a mother of four, having
coffee with four other mothers in a suburban development fifteen
miles from New York, say in a tone of quiet desperation, the prob-
lem. And the others knew, without words, that she was not talking
about a problem with her husband, or her children, or her home.
Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the prob-
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92 # Appeals to Gender
lem that has no name. They began, hesitantly, to talk about it. Later,
after they had picked up their children at nursery school and taken
them home to nap, two of the women cried, in sheer relief, just to
know they were not alone. (1920)
Women like these and the people who know themtheir husbands and
their childrenmay feel that Friedan is addressing them directly, I to you,
by the end of the book. But the subtlety and much of the rhetorical power
of The Feminine Mystique arise from a more indirect approach, tipped off
by the authors use of pronouns. She does not write from the radicalized
position of we, inviting dissatisfied women to join together under the ban-
ner of feminism. Nor does she follow the practice of the advertisers who
invite housewives to identify with images like supermom, saying in effect
You can be like me. Instead she borrows the rhetoric of objectivity from
the magazine psychologists and doctors of the day; she steps back and
invites the audience to join her as observers of the condition of women,
treating the ladies of the coffee group and other cases in the third person:
they all shared the same problem, they were not alone. To reinforce the
audience in the observers role, Friedan quotes authorities, such as (male)
doctors reporting on the housewifes syndrome and the housewifes
blight (2021). But rather than becoming distant and cold, the rhetori-
cal situation becomes highly dramatic as case after case appears. Author
and audience assume the role of research observers watching an experi-
ment in the process of going bad, or theatre-goers beholding a tragedy of
human waste and sorrow, left to wonder, how do our own lives compare?
The problem comes to seem more and more familiar.
In her second chapter, Friedan takes the image she has impressed upon
the minds of the observing audiencethe unhappy housewife with the
vague malady that unfolds in chapter 1and places it into competition
with the image of the happy housewife and ultrafeminine helpmate that
prevails in the advertisements and feature articles of a typical womens
magazine of the day:
The image of woman that emerges from this big, pretty magazine is
young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine, passive;
gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home.
The magazine surely does not leave out sex; the only passion, the only
pursuit, the only goal a woman is permitted is the pursuit of a man.
It is crammed full of food, clothing, cosmetics, furniture, and the physi-
cal bodies of young women, but where is the world of thought and
ideas, the life of the mind and spirit? In the magazine image, women
do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beau-
tiful and to get and keep a man. (36)
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The magazine woman is yet not augmented to the point of supernatural
power, as the lady with the flying hair would be in the images of the
1980s. This woman is reduced. Like the specialist in Wendell Berrys cri-
tique of modern society (see chapter 1), one part of the woman is unhealth-
ily distendedthe life of the body and particularly the function of repro-
ductionbut she is denied thought and ideas, the life of the mind and
spirit. Like the person reduced to slavery, her humanity is denied and she
is treated like a lower being, at best a child, at worst an animal.
Friedan expands the image and traces its American history for the re-
mainder of her book. She argues that, under the burden of this image,
womens wasted energy [is] destructive to their husbands, to their chil-
dren, and to themselves (377). The unfulfilled woman, striving to deny
her wholeness to fit the image, opens herself to all kinds of resentments,
neuroses, and physical ailments. The experiment is failing; the tragic waste
continues. Women are not merely sad; they are sick, and their sickness is
spreading to the whole culture.
The image of the thoughtful, awakening woman remains somewhat
poorly defined in this early work by Friedanrealistically so, considering
the argument that it is hard even to think outside of images so pervasively
imposed upon us by the mass media, as Orwell ominously warned in his
novel 1984. But the awakening has begun in the coffee circles and in the
pages of books like The Feminine Mystique. Friedan concludes that only
when women as well as men emerge from biological living to realize their
human selves, those leftover halves of life may become their years of greater
fulfillment:
Then the split in the image will be healed, and daughters will not
face that jumping-off point at twenty-one or forty-one. When their
mothers fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women, they
will not have to beat themselves down to be feminine; they can
stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they
are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And
when women do not need to live through their husbands and chil-
dren, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need
anothers weakness to prove their own masculinity. They can finally
see each other as they are. And this may be the next step in human
evolution. (37778)
Fulfillment becomes aligned with healing in the constellation of val-
ues that guides Friedans appeal to her audience. She appeals along the lines
of traditional humanism. Wholeness (health) involves not just the body,
but also the mind and spirit. When women are asked to remain in a state
of childhood, or when their importance is limited to bodily functions such
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94 # Appeals to Gender
as sex and reproduction or animal functions such as physical labor, they
are stuck in a biological world. In Friedans time, women could vote and
get an education, but they were asked to take on a kind of voluntary mind-
lessness. In a poignant appeal to time, Friedan calls for the next step in
human evolution.
Images of the Body and the Problem of Stereotyping
The mildness of Friedans humanist rhetoric no doubt accounted for her
wide appeal and sympathetic audience, but many writers in the womens
movement felt the need early on to turn up the volume. One of these was
Germaine Greer, whose book The Female Eunuch attracted a wide and more
radical audience when it came out in the early 1970s. Like Friedan, Greer
begins in the position of the observer, using passive-voice verbs and third-
person pronouns to describe the plight of women, but at the very end of
her book, in a kind of feminist manifesto entitled Revolution, she switches
abruptly to the first-person plural weWe have but one life to live, and
the first object is to find a way of salvaging that life from the disabilities
already inflicted upon it in the service of our civilization (326)and then
she ends by directly addressing the reader with the second person in her
very last sentence: What will you do? (329).
Much of the edge that Greer achieves throughout her book comes from
her focus on the female body and particularly female sexuality. In the in-
troduction, she writes,
female sexuality has been masked and deformed by most observers,
and never more so than in our own time. . . . What happens is that
the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and apprecia-
tion of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and
misrepresented by being identified as passivity. The vagina is oblit-
erated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs
of independence and vigor in the rest of her body are suppressed.
The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the
castratetimidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity. . . .
[F]emale reproduction is thought to influence the whole organism
in the operations of the Wicked Womb, source of hysteria, menstrual
depression, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise. (5)
Greer, a British woman who relocated to the United States, caught the
spirit of the European womens movement of the late 1960s, particularly
the French feminists who took to the streets with banners saying WE ARE
ALL HYSTERICS. The word hysterical, which derives from the Greek word
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for womb, has been used since ancient times to describe an illness that
crosses the boundaries between mind and body but has also been used in
association with a dismissive attitude toward the complaints of women.
By claiming the word that had for centuries been used against them, the
French feminists found a way of celebrating their difference from those
who would oppress them. Yes, we are different, they said in effect, but
now you must deal with our difference rather than using it as a stigma;
you must work through it rather than around it.3
Greer uses a similar tactic, arguing that, in the prevailing imagery of the
times, womens sexuality has been seen primarily as something lacking.
Because woman lacks the male genitalia, she takes on the attributes of the
eunuch. What has really happened is that the reality of her own sexuality
has been denied, the image of the vagina removed from sight and made
mysterious, an object of fear and loathing. The result is not only misrep-
resentation, but ultimately violence, an attempt to act out in real life what
has happened in the social imagination: namely, the destruction of the
woman. The penis becomes a sword or a gun in popular symbolism, and
the cycle of violence is perpetuated.
Repetition, the motor for this kind of image-perpetuation, gains force
in a culture where print and broadcasting media allow mass reproduction
of imagery, where television and internet flood the home and saturate the
mind with images designed for quick consumption and easy memory. So
it is that the practice of stereotyping emerges and takes hold as a key prob-
lem in modern times. The very word derives from the print industry; it
signifies the ability of the printing press to create master images and re-
produce them with exact precision. Thus, as Greer writes, the myth of the
Eternal Feminine, nowadays called the Stereotype, becomes the dominant
image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire:
Assuming that the goddess of consumer culture is an artifact, we em-
bark on an examination of how she comes to be made, the manu-
facture of the Soul. The chief element in the process is like the cas-
tration that we saw practiced upon the body, the suppression and
deflection of Energy. Following the same simple pattern, we begin at
the beginning with Baby, showing how of the greater the less is made.
The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines
with her feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity
and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it
doesnt she is given further conditioning as a corrective, especially by
psychologists, whose assumptions and prescriptions [amount to] the
Psychological Sell. (5)
EBSCOhost – printed on 1
SHOW MORE…
Unit 10 Assn. Consulting Skills
IT402-6:Generate persuasive materials for information technology consulting.
Purpose
This unit closes the course with persuasion presentations. Make sure you investigate all parts of the unit for activities and requirements before posting or completing graded work.
Food for Thought:
What are the most important skills that an IT consultant must develop, and why?
Which of these skills can you use in your professional career, even if you are not intending to become an IT consultant?
Assignment Instructions
Content
Follow all instructions carefully. This Assignment is comprised of a PowerPoint presentation with audio.
First, the scenarios presented in Unit 8 are shared below:
Scenario No. 1
Trisha George is a college English professor and an author who has written novels and books of poetry. She does not have a website but wants one. She will provide with content such as her professional resume, information about her writings, and details she wants her students to know about her classes. She would also like at least one page that highlights her college and department and asks that the information is gathered from her school. A shopping cart for her novels and poetry will be necessary. You have been hired as the IT consultant and prepared a project proposal for the website.
Scenario No. 2
Baxter’s Ticket Sales is a small sports-ticketing venue. The company has decided to move to a new location in a neighboring community to take advantage of lower sales and property taxes. A network must be developed in the new building. There are 10 workers in one large room who each use a desktop computer to facilitate sales. There is an office staffed by two people who each need their own desktop computers. Additionally, the “mail room” requires another computer for the staff to access the database and fulfill orders. The project will need to include the development of the topology, network security, connection to the Internet, etc. You have been hired as the IT consultant and prepared a project proposal for the network.
Scenario No. 3
North Music Warehouse is a wholesale establishment that sells student-grade musical instruments to both music stores and individuals. The president of the company realizes that workers in “the warehouse” – which is actually several buildings – are slowed by having to return frequently to the main office to retrieve printed orders. Efficiency would be heightened with a mobile application designed to access the sales database and log the movement of instruments, so these workers may locate instruments in the warehouse buildings and prepare them for shipping without having to spend the time returning to the office. You have been hired as the IT consultant and prepared a project proposal for this application.
Scenario No. 4
Angie Smith is a new business owner and has just opened Angie’s Antiques. She needs a database to be developed to hold information about her varied inventory and sales. She intends to develop a customer list to be able to advertise specials. Three employees have been hired to run the store, so the database will also need to include employee data and payroll information. You have been hired as the IT consultant and prepared a project proposal for the database.
Assignment Requirements
Your client – which you chose from the scenarios above – has accepted your proposal but has since requested a change. This may be a change in scope, time, cost, resources, or even a suggestion relating to design or implementation. Since this is not a “real” project, you will invent the client’s request. This presentation is your professional effort in convincing your client that your original plan is better than his/her suggestion.
Your presentation must be comprised of the following eight slides and content. Do not add any slides unless specifically stated below that it is acceptable. Follow all audio and design requirements listed below.
Slide and content requirements:
Cover slide (no audio). Include at least the project name and your name.
Give a brief overview of the project.
Give an overview of the client’s suggestion for change. Do not include your opinion on this slide.
Show pros and cons of client’s suggestion for change – use bulleted lists.
Show pros and cons of Consultant’s original idea – use bulleted lists. This must be focused only on the part of the project that the client has targeted for suggested change.
Highlight the most important Pros for the Consultant’s idea through illustration (a chart, graph, diagram, wireframe, or other relevant image).
You have the option for an additional slide at this point to show a second illustration; if you decide to do this, you must include audio on this slide as well, and both illustration slides would fulfill the same part of the rubric as one entity.
Reiterate your stance that the original idea is in the best interest of the client and the project; request approval to remain with the original idea.
Consultant contact information (no audio). Include at least your name, email, and phone number. It is acceptable to invent a phone number if you are uncomfortable sharing it with your professor.
Audio requirements:
Important:Write a transcriptbeforeyou record audio files. Place the transcript in the “notes” section for each slide.
All slides except for the cover and the contact information must include audio. Do not add audio to the cover and contact slides.
Do not read the content on your slides; the client can read them, so your job is to make a convincing argument instead throughexplanationof the content on the slides.
Prepare professional language work. Avoid conversational speech. Be mindful that you do not insult the client – your wording is very important.
Practice before you record to avoid sounding like you are simply reading your transcript. Work to pace your speech so that you are not talking too fast or too slow.
Make sure the recording quality is clear and that there are no extraneous noises in the background.
The aggregate timing of the six-audio file/recordings together must be at least 2.5 minutes (150 seconds) butno more than 4 minutes(240 seconds).
Review the following tutorial for more information about adding audio to PowerPoint presentations:https://kapextmediassl-a.akamaihd.net/IST/media/IT402/1405C/Unit_10/Video/tutorial.html
Design requirements:
Use a design theme.
Do not use animation or transitions.