Rhetorical Velocity on Twitter
A tweet, no matter what it is about or what it says, has rhetorical velocity by design. The character limit is the reason for this. With that in mind, some tweets have more rhetorical velocity than others. There is no exact formula for what gives one tweet more rhetorical velocity over another, but it may have something to do with the type of message the tweeter is trying to send.
For the issue of animal testing, I found that pictures alongside short quotes or captions had the greatest amount of rhetorical velocity. Most of the time, the main goal of someone tweeting about animal testing is to use pathos to get their message across to their audience, so pictures are extremely effective. This tweet from @peta is a perfect example of this:
This tweet has a high rhetorical velocity because it immediately elicits an emotional response from the viewer. It is hard to ignore a picture on twitter and once you see it, it is hard to not agree with the message that is being sent. These two attributes of this picture give it more rhetorical velocity because it makes it more likely to be retweeted and spread throughout the internet. It is for that reason that PETA has similar tweets to this one, such as the following:
These tweets are simple and effective are getting their point across very quickly. They are also easily understood by any audience, which is important because the audience for these tweets is, in fact, everyone.
I attempted to mimic some of the tactics that PETA used in my own tweets:
I kept my tweet simple and made sure that I implemented pathos. I tried to do this by using a picture with a brief caption underneath. Since awareness of animal testing was the goal of my twitter page, I this tweet is effective in getting the message across that animal testing horrible, and it does in such a short way so it should have more amplitude and be easier to spread.
In another one of my tweets I decided to use a quote from Immanual Kant:
I don’t feel as though this tweet has as high of a rhetorical velocity as that of the pictures, but I think that it is effective for a few reasons. The first reason is that it uses ethos by implementing a quote from well-known philosopher. It is a very short quote and does not take much time to read, but it gives the reader a lot to think about as the subject of animal testing goes.
Views All Time
Views Today