Rhetorical Velocity: Marijuana Legalization Tweets
There are many great organizations out there that are doing an outstanding job spreading news about marijuana legalization on twitter. I have chosen to highlight a tweet from Pot4Prosperity.
Pot4Prosperity is an advocacy group that is seeking to advocate for easy and legal access to marijuana. In the tweet I have selected from them it states “1000 veterans line up for free marijuana.” It also has a link to an ABC news article that talks about how Colorado has been trying to add Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the list of medical conditions that patients can receive marijuana prescriptions for. However, now that marijuana is legal for anyone who is over 21 years old, 1000 veterans lined up at a Colorado giveaway in order to get the plant to help alleviate their PTSD symptoms. The connection of U.S. veterans to medicinal marijuana does a great job increasing the rhetorical velocity of this tweet. When people see that people defending our country that are looked up to as heroes are using marijuana it will cause them to realize that there are many positive benefits from the plant. Adding the hashtag #Legalize also improves the rhetorical velocity allowing the tweet to be grouped in with all the other tweets about marijuana legalization with this hashtag.
I emulated these strategies of rhetorical velocity in my five most recent tweets. In all of them I tweeted a sentence or two describing the relevant news story I read and linked the tweet to the news story. In my most recent tweet I read an article about an inhaler that was created through 3D printing. This inhaler offers a method to use medical marijuana that doesn’t involve smoking it. This is a great way to build support for legalization. Some people who may currently be against medical marijuana may change their minds after seeing that marijuana can now be taken in a more traditional way consistent with other medicines available. This broadens the audience of people that the tweet applies to and would be likely to retweet it and spread the news. I also added the same hashtag as found in the Pot4Prosperity tweet which will greatly help my rhetorical velocity. By placing the same hashtag in my tweet, it will come up with the tweets from Pot4Prosperity whenever someone searches the hashtag. This will increase the viewing audience of my tweet far beyond that of just my followers. With this great rhetorical velocity backed by an official news article, this tweet should reach a wide audience and spread awareness very quickly.
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