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<u>Smoking Kills</u>
The photo featuring the words “Smoking kills” and “About 106,000 people in the UK die each year due to smoking” features extremely powerful visual and textual elements. The intended audience ranges from those who have no opinion of smoking all the way to those who smoke cigarettes daily. This photo will reach children who haven’t even though about touching a cigarette, to those thinking about smoking, to those doing research on smoking, to smokers themselves.
This photo shows a Caucasian hand holding a cigarette in one of the most common ways, between the index and middle fingers, looking like a fake “hand gun”, with the “shadow” showing a gun. This is a strong photo that will draw a viewer in as the visual shows the “fake hand gun” image is portrayed when one holds a cigarette. It implies that cigarettes kill and are as lethal as a gun.
The textual elements that appear are the words “Smoking kills” and “About 106,000 people in the UK die each year due to smoking” The words that stand out the most are “kills”, “106,000”, “die”, “UK”, and “smoking”. Most of these words are intended for the audiences that can relate to smoking issues, while “UK” will connect directly with those of the United Kingdom and the whole countries smoking issue. The words “kills” and “die” are extremely powerful attention grabbers, not words we hear every day and will definitely play on negative thoughts of emotion. The large number of “106,000” will emphasize the sheer amount of those affected and play on the emotion of just being a “statistic”. The word “smoking” of course directly relates to the message that this image is trying to portray and educate about.
Personally, this image made me want to do research since it specifically relates to the UK, while also relating to everyone with some sort of interest about smoking. My research came up with results that the UK is ranked 80<sup>th</sup> in countries of consuming cigarettes, 12 places behind America. This visual caused further research for myself which helped me to understand that this picture accomplished, at the very least, the goal of making people aware. 80<sup>th </sup>on a list of countries made me realize how small the “106,000” number of deaths really is. 438,000 people in the U.S. die per year due to smoking, while a whole 41,000 deaths are caused by secondhand smoke.
This photo places emphasis on two of the main modes of persuasion, logos and pathos. The main emphasis is being placed on pathos, this photo plays hard on emotion, specifically negative emotion. It uses both the text and visual elements to put fear, knowledge, and interest into the audience. The words “kills” and “die” stand out the most, they are some of the most threatening words in the English language. At the end of the day, our whole purpose of life is to live, right? The visual element of the “hand gun” and the shadow of the “real gun” play on the emotion that you are essentially killing yourself if you smoke. If these visuals convince the audience to do further research, you can dig deeper and realize that gun isn’t just being used on yourself, but on the ones around you as well. Secondhand smoke is no joke and causes around one tenth of the deaths that smoking causes to firsthand users. Logos is prevalent when you read the text “About 106,000 people in the UK die each year due to smoking”. The large numbers, and straight to the point facts force the audience to face reality and dig deeper into understanding why they are accurate and how these statistics came to be. It peaked my interest and caused me to do further research into the topic in both my own country, and how the UK and U.S. relate to other countries on the scale of users and deaths of smoking. Surprisingly, this photo didn’t touch on the economic impacts of smoking. The photo could have contained economic statistics in textual form, or the visual form of something like burning money. Which I believe would be a strong visual element that would play on both logos and pathos. Everyone can relate to money struggles and the pain of seeing it burn. If the picture showed the impact of a cigarette smoker’s economy, it would help push people further away from the idea of smoking and even further push the idea across that smoking is awful for you and for others.
I believe all expected audiences will be reached by this photo, which in my opinion, is literally everyone. The strong use of pathos to connect with the audience on an emotional level helps drive home the main issue of smoking, which is that if you smoke, it will negatively impact both yourself and those around you. The breathtaking facts that are applied through the use of logos just gives you the sheer amount of volume of those affected by smoking daily! Not just yearly, monthly, or weekly, but daily. The audience may directly connect with the statistics provided from the UK, or if they are from another country, they may use this knowledge to research and directly compare to other countries, like the way I did. This photo uses many of these tools to find a way to connect with any and everyone.
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