Rhetorical Defense: The Galbreath Memorial Chapel

I remember when I came to OU for the first time; I was given a tour of the campus. The only thing I really remember standing out to me, other than the overall beauty of the campus, was the story about the Galbreath Memorial Chapel. I thought it was so romantic, and you can never have enough romance in your life, so I decided it would be a good focus for my campus history project. I believe overall that my piece was very successful in getting my point across.

The audience for my “promotional piece” would be anyone interested in learning a little history behind one of the buildings on the Ohio University campus. They would probably be a young adult to adult in age. I believe my design would cater to my audience because the information is well-organized. I decided to do a bi-folded pamphlet because it has the same effect as a bulletin that many churches give out. I decided to model my piece after a church bulletin because I thought it made a nice commonality between regular churches and the Galbreath chapel.

My purpose is to inform about the history behind the chapel. My piece is successful because it includes the reasoning behind the donation of the chapel, who donated it and some interesting facts about it. It falls short, though, because out of all of the sources I checked for information they all said basically the same thing so there wasn’t a whole lot of information out there. I had originally planned on possibly doing a PowerPoint but it would have been a pretty short and dry one, so I felt like a pamphlet was the next best thing. Most brochures and such tend to be a bit boring so I decided to throw some color into my piece to liven it up a bit. I chose the shades of blue that I did because they went well with all of the pictures and they went well with the theme of peacefulness that is usually associated with chapels. I outlined the color-blocks in black to make them stand out more from the white background. On the front cover I chose to put the little black designs around the name of the chapel because they are feminine and the chapel was named after Helen Mauck. I chose the font of type because it looks like handwriting so I feel like it makes it seem a little more personal than if I had just typed it up in Times New Roman.

I believe my piece appeals to ethos because I tried to use language that was easy to understand and I didn’t put any bias into it. I appealed to logos because my bulletin was organized in mostly a chronological order and made sense. I appealed to pathos because I wrote about love which most people can relate to. I mostly used information pertaining to the history of the building and why it was built because that was all I really wanted my piece to be about. I decided not to include any information about the speakers at the dedication ceremony, which one of my sources focused on. I think it would have been unnecessary for this project. After all the consideration I put into my project and all of the design decisions I made I believe my promotional piece is effective in its purpose of informing people of the history of the Helen Mauck Galbreath Memorial Chapel.