In Class Assignment: Show and Tell/Using The Five Canons

For this assignment I decided to choose the time when I first went shopping for prom dresses as a junior in high school. It was my first prom, so i wanted my dress to be something meaningful that i could treasure forever. My mom and I were in NYC for a weekend looking at colleges and we found this cute little boutique with all different kinds of sample dresses from a sample store where the dresses were being sold there first and then sold from different large department stores. I couldn't have been more excited, I was going to have a one of a kind dress for my junior prom. The second i walked into the store, this pink, long, sparkly disney princess dress caught my eye, it was SO Sophie. I just had to have it, or i wouldn't have been satisfied with anything else. At a whooping 500$ my mom was not about to pay for the dress, but the sales people made their pitch quite convinving, after calling my grandma and asking her to contribute to my cause, i ended up getting the dress I paid 250$ and my grandma paid for the rest. I used almost all the money in my piggy bank, but in the end, I honestly thought it was worth it.

Now I'm going to use the Neo-Artistitilian approach and the five cannons to explain why i ended up purchasing this item/why i was so influenced. The first of the five canons is invention, invention is when you recognize the need for a message. The people that worked at the store knew that they needed to sell this dress, and i was the perfect consumer, a young 16 year old girl who wanted/(thought i needed) that dress. The next of the classical canons is arrangement, and that is how they organized the message, they made a sales pitch of why i should buy they dress and how it would be beneficial to me in the long run. They said i could sue it for any occasion when i needed a ball gown or to go to a fancy party. The next of the canons is style, they were very persuasive since they were sales people. Their goal was to sell their product to me. They were very polite and set up a dressing room for me, the fact that they were attending to my every need made me want to purchase the dress even more. The message was delivered from the two people working at the store, they told me where the dresses were made and why they were in that specific sample store. The last of the 5 canons is memory. There was no way i could forget the message that was being relayed to me. I wanted that dress and there was nothing stopping me from getting it, they even threw in a free pair of earrings with my purchase. Language really influences the audience because without their push for me to purchase their product and all the benefits it would come with I would not be nearly as inclined to purchase the dress at such a hefty price of 500$