Lindsey+Schmidt

Text-pocalypse Now?

http://www.good.is/post/text-pocalypse-now/

Summary : This article is about how texting is not ruining english and harming young Americans literacy rates. Most people believe that texting is destroying the english language due to the overuse of abbreviations, but Mark Peters disagrees. Peters interviews David Crystal, author of //__Txting: The Gr8 Db8__//, who says that the majority of texts don't even use abbreviations and that most of the teenagers who text do better in school and are more involved in the community. Peters points out that adults often text about important business situations and that teenagers aren't the only people who text. Peters calls must all of the arguments for texting harming the english language myths. He also asked students if they would ever use text abbreviations in their papers and he received an overwhelming response of not a chance. Peters is heavy with logos because he interviewed an author of a book on texting and knows statistics and other facts readily. Interviewing Crystal gives him ethos at the same time that he gets logos because he is using someone with more knowledge on texting than the average person. He doesn't use pathos much expect for a sentence or two in the first sentence where he makes fun of the extreme negativity that tends to surround the topic of texting having a negative affect on the english language.

Analyze : Peters seems to concentrate more on logos over his character and appeal to emotion. He never gives the other side of the argument a chance. The whole article is on how texting isn't bad for teenagers and that it doesn't have a negative affect on english, he could have given a point of the other side of the argument. In this argument I believe that using mainly logos works; he wanted to prove that texting doesn't harm language in the way it is portrayed to in most Americans' minds. The fact that he interviewed a person who knows more about the topic then he does also makes the argument better. Pathos isn't used well in terms of writing in this article but on the page there were two images that were funny. They both were of adults with speech bubbles with text abbreviations in them. The only way they affected the argument was that they had text abbreviations in them, they didn't show that texting isn't a bad thing or good thing. Mark Peters works for Good.is and after exploring the site I believe it is for the middle class audience. It doesn't concentrate on celebrities that the younger generation would be interested in and it doesn't talk about things that the extremely rich would want to read about but it covers the general everything else. This article isn't aimed for teenagers, he talks about how adults text too and I believe he was trying to convince the people who didn't grow up texting that it isn't going to tear apart the language. For me it was affective because I am very easily persuaded and enjoy facts but I'm not sure if just the facts works for the audience he was talking to. Over all I believe he did an ok job being persuasive in this article, he shouldn't rely completely on facts but his facts are hard to ignore.


 * // Lindsey - Nicely done! Thorough and well-thought out. CHECK PLUS ~ Prof. Wendt //**


 * // Kirk Semple tells the story of a family torn in his New York Times article, "Interrupted by War, the Struggle To Care for Family and Business". The 15 year old girl looked down at her younger sister's tear stained face. Their parents got divorced a week ago and they were forced to move from their home in Syracuse to their grandpa's house in New Jersey but that wasn't the only reason they were crying. Right after their mother, Specialist Shannon A. Cooper, had moved her daughters the National Guard shipped her to Iraq for a year. The teenage girls cry each time they get to talk to their mother on the phone; they try to stay strong but being a teenage girl without a mother or a father at home is almost unbearable (Semple). Single parents have it rough. They may have more than one child and need to support their family on just one salary! Jobs are hard to come by, homes and food are expensive, and single parents often struggle to find these basic things. The military can offer a single parent all of these necessities though, and can give it to them for a number of years. The problem with joining the military as a single parent is the children. The people in the military work 16 hour days and are randomly called to active duty - which doesn't give the mother much time to be with her child or children. There are also some single parents who use their child as an excuse to not work while in training. So the question is should the military allow single parents to enlist and give them the support they need? Or should the military think of the children and not allow single parents to be away from their children for so long? //**