Iliana Chavez

Cassie Dowd 

How to Guide for Talking Snakes Essay 

A how to guide offers me an effective way to convey the idea that we need to raise awareness about the wrongness of cyberbullying to mostly young “teens” and young “adults” in the age range of twelve to twenty-three who are talking snakes because I want to be able to provide ways to prevent cyberbullying, but I also want to show different ways of how cyberbullying is done. A how to guide can be used to present a practical skill to a wide audience. Therefore, by creating a how to guide I want to be able to demonstrate to my audience a guide for them to make better decisions before they think cyberbullying is an acceptable online behavior. 

My audience is where the creative part of an unusual character comes to play, it includes mostly young “teens” and young “adults” in the age range of 12-23 who are talking snakes. I used talking snakes as my audience because according to the Urban Dictionary, a snake is “Someone who will for no reason try and hurt you (Snake you). They will go behind your back to tell your secrets but try to make themselves look innocent in the whole situation and try to blame it on you in the end. They go behind your back to tell your secrets.” Snakes who talk are the ones who hide behind a screen committing the act of cyberbullying. By making talking snakes my audience I am informing the snakes on how to quit cyberbullying by providing statistics, reasons it is a problem, ways to prevent it, and actual scenarios that occur. This age group is more likely than others to start to become obsessed with the media. Social media applications such as instagram, twitter, facebook are the most popular now these days. In society, parents believe that it is reasonable to give their child a phone at the young age so that they are kept in contact with them for safety, but what they do not realize nor become aware of is that their children are feeding off of social media, texting, and just the overall media in general. This causes them to begin to be involved in problems that can take part on the media or even sometimes just in school or work and lead them to posting hatred comments and posts about other individuals. The act of cyberbullying involves posting, sending, or sharing negative, hurtful, false, and disrespectful content about another individual. It causes embarrassment or humiliation by sharing private or personal information about someone else, Cyberbullying can even come to the point of unlawful or criminal conduct. I feel like like my audience will most likely read how to guides because they are short and down to the point of what is being informed. My message is bringing awareness of a serious issue that occurs in society on a daily basis, but at the same time I am being creative by including the talking snakes as the audience because it is ironic how a snake could be related to a person who cyberbullies. 

In my first slide I decided to include an image of a snake because the talking snake is the audience and I wanted an image that was bright and would catch their attention. My title is all in capitalized letters and the subtitle is all lowercase so that the title stands out more than anything to the individual reading my how to guide. The font I used for my title was Amatic SC because it is a simple but effectual hand drawn font. I added a comment bubble that says “Cyberbullying Edition” coming out of the snakes mouth so that the audience is aware of the issue I am addressing, cyberbullying. In every slide, the background picture is snake skin so that the “talking snakes” are attracted and convinced to continue reading through the how to guide. 

A few of my slide’s titles were red in “impact” font, I felt like the word impact meant something to my topic because cyberbullying indeed makes a huge negative impact on individuals. The red colored font was to put an emphasis on my topic of cyberbullying. Red has very high visibility and is associated with danger, strength, power, war, and determination. Cyberbullying connects to this and these symbols can be used to signify the way talking snakes feel as cyberbullies.  I also put emphasis on things for the talking snakes by underlining headings, putting headers in bold, and highlighting the text one color and keeping the text another color because I feel like that makes certain things that I am including become more important for the audience to read about.  

Most of the titles on each slide is the same font except the last slide because it’s an example. I made this example because I wanted to provide the audience with a real scenario of how cyberbullies are able to use iMessage, which is a common way for people with iPhones to text, to cyberbully and send negative texts and attack other individuals to do something or else they will face worse consequences from the bully as seen in the fake text message I created. I chose to include emojis in the iMessage example because they could catch the talking snakes attention since the age range of twelve to twenty-three is most likely to use emojis because they are a fun way to conversate with others. I was creative when making this iMessage because I chose for a rat to be attacked through text messaging by a snake, I used a forceful and suspicious tone to allow the audience of talking snakes to realize how they are able to scare others through their negative behavior of cyberbullying. I tried to make an effect on the audience’s attention in my second slide to provide information to the talking snakes of how serious of a problem cyberbullying is. Since this part of my slides dealt with causes and effects, I chose to create a yellow border colored box for the effects that cyberbullying puts amongst individuals, and then created a red border colored box for the negative effects that continue and lead the individual being attacked by cyberbullies to commit serious actions against themselves. The arrows pointing to the red box are inserted in order for the audience to continue reading and discover how truly deep cyberbullying is. In my second to last slide I included statistics about cyberbullying. Since the age range I created my how to guide for is most likely not to read anything too lengthy or intellectual, I decided to only include three statistics I found most valuable and I addressed them in a perspective of animals. Since this is a young range audience, I felt like I needed to get straight to the point because they are most likely not to read things that look or sound complicated. I added only a number of four steps for the talking snakes to follow. They will become careless if it is, therefore I made the steps short and straightforward. Then in the rest of the slides I provided information for the talking snakes to keep in mind because this information is valuable to them in order to follow the how to prevent cyberbullying steps I provided. The images I included in the “steps” slides were to grab the audience’s attention since they would most likely rather read things that only have cartoon like images. Overall, the theme of the actual powerpoint is dark because I wanted to express that cyberbullying is a dark topic. Dark correlating with the talking snakes because they are negative and hateful.

Bibliography

Bullyingstatistics.org. (2009). Cyber Bullying Statistics. [online] Available at: http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/cyber-bullying-statistics.html [Accessed 11 Mar. 2019].

This article was useful to my RIP project because it provided various statistics for me to choose from. I was able to include three statistics in my RIP project in order to appeal to a use of ethos. The statistics were able to give me some accurate information, and I turned the wording to make it speak to my audience of talking snakes.

StopBullying.gov. (2017). Prevent Cyberbullying. [online] Available at: https://www.stopbullying.gov/cyberbullying/prevention/index.html [Accessed 11 Mar. 2019].

This article was useful for my RIP project because it provided me with ways to prevent cyberbullying. Through the use of this information I read in the article, I was able to take out some tips to include in my RIP project to provide the talking snakes with five different ways they can prevent cyberbullying. 

StopBullying.gov. (2017). Effects of Bullying. [online] Available at: https://www.stopbullying.gov/at-risk/effects/index.html [Accessed 11 Mar. 2019].

This article was useful for my RIP project because it provided me with the effects of cyberbullying. In this article, I was able to find the effects that individuals go through when they are cyberbullied. I included effects of cyberbullying in a slide of my how to guide, and then also connected other effects that the main effects of being cyberbullied lead to.