Clemson Dining Halls

I watched a English 103 project that focused on the problems with Clemson dining halls. I liked most of the content of their information but I thought some of their presentation methods needed some work.

The first thing I noticed was that there was really no way for the audience to gather any sense of the ethos of the filmmakers.The style of the video where they simply had a voice-over while filming various sections of the dining halls gave the impression of laziness and seemed very unprofessional. I think a better way to present the information would have been to show clips of the dining hall while playing the voice over and then switching the screen back and forth to the actual person who is speaking. This would enable the audience to get more of a feel of who is talking to them and would boost the creators' ethos.

I also couldn't help but notice how each argument on flawed dining halls was practically verbatim. This seemed like a major flaw in analysis of the actual problems and was obvious to the viewer that not much thought was put into this portion of the project.

They did a great job including the opinions of real Clemson students in their project. This made the project much more credible because it showed that other, real students shared the same opinions. However, out of a total of about 10 questions asked, about 5 were answered by the same male. This guys opinion really can't be labeled as the official opinion of Clemson's student body so therefore I thought it was a little biased.

The best part of the video was when they showed physical evidence of the lack of cleanliness in Clemson dining halls. The instance where they took the clean white rag and wiped the inside of a standard cup to find it covered in black filth was really disgusting and relied heavily on the rhetorical strategy, pathos. Even this presentation method was flawed. If they wanted to show the audience that truly any cup in the cafeteria was that dirty they could have sampled several cups, or showed a random selection of a cup from the cup holders (to prove they didn't single out a particularly dirty cup to help support the argument for their project's sake).

Overall I thought the video/argument was solid, but had many minor flaws that reduced the credibility and weakened the argument. I would give it a B/B+.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyakVf_bYTE