Author Biography

Lincoln McQuiston is a freshman who is working as hard to prove his high school self wrong. He is the oldest child of a family of four. He grew up playing football and playing video games in his free time. Lincoln is going to school full-time and wants to major in marketing.

This essay was composed in January 2024 and uses MLA documentation.

For the first time, you are standing in an enormous building surrounded by thousands of people, 10,270 to be exact. You are watching the nail-biting last seconds of a basketball game unfold in front of you. With butterflies in your stomach and ringing in your ears, you scream with the crowd, “5…4…3…2…1!” as the time runs out and the game is over! They did it, and Utah State won the basketball game. You notice all your peers rush onto the court to go and celebrate with your team! You watch for a moment, and awe strikes as you see the fellowship and joy among them, and you decide to join them! These are the kinds of ups that you get to participate in as a part of the Utah State Basketball Community.

This community is amazing, and one of its most important goals is to make sure everyone feels welcome. They want people to feel comfortable and to be a part of their community. They know that making people feel welcome is a great way for people to have the desire to come back and join them again. They achieve this goal by using social media. Another important part of this community is supporting the basketball team. For example, the basketball team coach said in a press conference talking about the Utah State Basketball Community, “The place was just electric, and they win games for us” (Danny Sprinkle). I always love to see, hear, and read about the team. Through ethos and pathos, the Instagram post (Figure 1) I will analyze makes the community feel excited about the upcoming game.

The Instagram post uses pathos in lots of different ways such as pictures to draw people in. They draw the reader in by using a picture of one of the basketball players. They want people to be interested in what they are reading. Another simple way that they get the reader interested in the post is by the font and color of the wording. They use white lettering on a white background, forcing the reader to be intentional and almost strain to read what they have to say. Plus, it matches what they are telling the reader, which is that at the next game, they are going to be doing a whiteout., where everyone wears white so that the whole Stadium is in sync. Another thing about the document is that it is simple and super easy to get to. You go to the Instagram page and scroll down to find it.

Ethos plays an important role in making the community feel excited about the coming game. The document uses ethos by again using one of the basketball player’s pictures on the post. By doing this, they gain the trust of the reader because, hopefully, the reader will know who the picture is of and trust that player. Another way that they gain the trust of the reader is by being the official Instagram account. They are the USU Basketball Instagram page. They have a blue check mark next to their account, which means that they are an organization. Using the Instagram page and the document that I have chosen the Utah State Basketball Community can get information out to their peers super effectively by making frequent posts on their social media accounts. On their post, they make sure to give a time, date, and location of the basketball game so that members of the community can attend and feel the comradery in the community. They also made sure to put information the reader would need to know, such as the whiteout, into the post.

The lexis of the post is specifically tailored for the community. While the post uses only a few words, they are carefully chosen. On the post, it says “Aggies vs. Spartans.” If you are not in this community, this might not make a ton of sense to you. What is an Aggie? Aggie is the term used to refer to the students at Utah State University because it started out as an agricultural college. It also talks about “the Spectrum” which is the location of the basketball game. The Spectrum could be confusing also because if you were not in the community, you might not know where that is. The Spectrum is Utah State’s Basketball arena. It seats 10,270 people (about the seating capacity of Cameron Basketball Stadium at Duke University), and it is an amazing place to watch a basketball game. Fun fact: It is one of the only arenas in Utah that broke the decibel reader’s mind when a study was done to find out which college had the loudest arena. The document also talks about a “whiteout.” This is important to know about because white is one of the school colors. So, when they say “whiteout,” it tells everyone who is going to the game to wear white because that is the color that the basketball team is going to be wearing.

All of this is important because if this post hadn’t been made, then the community might not have found out about the basketball game on the 30th of September. If this post had not been made, then the students might not have known that the basketball team was going to wear white and that they wanted the community to wear white with them to support them. The community would not have known when and where the game was going to take place. They also would not have gotten the excitement and anticipation that the basketball team must play this upcoming game. To sum it up, this post was important to get the information out to the community. So that the community can support what they love to be a part of and help people feel the “Spectrum Magic” (the energy levels in the Spectrum).