The Montana Meth Project: Applying Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad to a Persuasive Anti-drug Media Campaign Elizabeth A. Dickinson Courses: Persuasion; also Rhetoric, Health, Theory, Nonverbal, and Media classes Objectives: To understand Burke’s dramatism and use the pentad as a tool to analyze advertisements in the Montana Meth Project anti-drug campaign Rationale Kenneth Burke’s (1960) dramatistic pentad is a theory and tool to analyze motivation in symbolic action. To Burke, both verbal and nonverbal elements in language are persuasive in nature and instrumental in driving social functions and processes. Rhetorical meaning is embedded in language; dramatism offers critics a way to analyze messages to determine human motivation behind them. Based in this notion of dramatism, language is a form of action that literally creates the reality or worldview in which humans act. The pentad is a tool of analysis made up of five elements*act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose*that help a critic understand the drama or reality implicit in any given artifact or message. Act explores what happened (what took place or what someone consciously did). Scene examines where and when the act occurred (a physical locale, a literal or figurative time, era, period, phase, etc.). Agent is who or what kind of person or group carried out the act. Agency involves the means by which the agent performed the act or how the agent accomplished what took place. Last, the purpose asks why the agent performed the act; it can be overt but is usually concealed. The five elements go beyond naming who, what, when, where, and why. Critics can explore relationships between elements and examine ratios (sets of two elements) to understand which elements are emphasized and how they work together. The pentad breaks a message down to its most basic elements, which should be viewed as questions a critic can ask of a message or artifact. For example, these elements could Elizabeth A. Dickinson is a doctoral candidate in the Communication and Journalism Department at the University of New Mexico. Email: edickins@unm.edu, Website: www.unm.edu/ Âedickins ISSN 1740-4622 (print)/ISSN 1740-4630 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/17404620902974824 Communication Teacher Vol. 23, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 126131 Downloaded By: [Dickinson, Elizabeth] At: 17:14 9 July 2009