Food Allergy: A Potential Therapy

Assignment 5: Rhetorical Analysis

Food Allergy: A Potential Therapy

        I chose to research and write about a potential treatment for food allergy. My claim is oral immunotherapy and sublingual immunotherapy can become the main treatments for food allergies in the near future with the help of anti-IgE monoclonal antibody (mAb), which is used to reduce allergic reactions associated with them, even with the patients that have a high risk of allergic reactions. As the number of people being allergic to food is increasing dramatically all over the world each year, we really need to find a viable solution for it. My targeted audience is parents whose children have to suffer from food allergy. The reason I chose them to be my targeted audience is that among the people being allergic to food, babies and kids take a large proportion; and as they might be too young to understand what they are going through, it is their parents who must know what kind of food they are allergic to and take them to an expert to be treated with oral immunotherapy or sublingual immunotherapy. I want to convince them that up to now, oral immunotherapy and sublingual immunotherapy are the best remedies that are experienced and proved by food experts and professors. This can be shown in the photo essay through images and four key design elements – C-R-A-P criteria: contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.

        Throughout the creation of this photo essay, there were different rhetorical strategies that I used to achieve my purpose with my audience. I would like to talk first about images. For this visual element, I used photographs and charts to convey my messages to the audience. The chart of food allergy pyramid appealing to logos in the first slide of my photo essay demonstrates how food can cause severe allergic symptoms to death, which can immediately raise parents’ awareness about their children’s disease. Another feature is the photograph of a baby rashing on his back after eating peanut. For me, that picture has the most persuasive power since it provokes a complete and strong reaction. As I claimed that there are more and more babies and kids getting allergic to food, a picture of a baby which appeals to pathos will say it all.

        Besides images, I also used the four key design elements to improve the effect of my photo essay. The first criterion is contrast. I chose different typefaces to visually separate headings from my main text. For instance, in my first slide, I wrote “Food Allergy – A Potential Therapy” in a visually big size to let readers know that is my topic. Moreover, for every word that I want to emphasize to attract my audience’s attention, I applied bold formatting and colored them orange so they stand out from others, making them significant. The second criterion is repetition. For example, I used the same size and font for all the captions beside each image. This repeated format indicates that those captions are equivalent – they are all showing where the images are from and what they illustrate. I found this feature effective because it lets readers quickly glance through my photo essay and find information. The third criterion is alignment. In my photo essay, I put all the visual elements on the left and on the top beside is the small caption of each of them. Text is left justified and put on the right side of the slide. I think this consistent alignment is effective since it provides a logical and attractive design for the whole photo essay as well as highlights the consistency of information on one specific slide, which lets my audience know thoroughly where my claims and evidences begin and end. The last criterion I used in my photo essay is proximity. That is I put the caption of each picture right beside them so that when readers look at the caption, they know exactly what it explains for, thus raising the effectiveness of my photo essay. However, I think there is an ineffective feature in my photo essay. It is one of my personal photographs – the picture of my hand being allergic after eating seafood. It is simply because I feel that the picture is quite faint and not strong enough to show the danger of food allergy.