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Shannon Brown
Amy Bolaski
English 100
September 9, 2013
On August 29th, 2013 an article titled “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person” was published on Slate.com. Slate is a free online current affairs and culture magazine which is updated daily, and has a reputation for publishing articles that is oppose the majority, even if the stance they are representing is unpopular. According to www.alexa.com, a website that provides commercial web traffic data, Slate reaches approximately 8.5 million people per month, and reaches more females than males.
In her satirical and persuasive rant against private schools,
author Allison Benedikt takes on the persona of a lefty liberal
clearly targeting well off and educated parents a who can afford the best for their children and slaps
them across the face with guilt. Benedikt uses judgment and sarcasm as well as appeal to ethos to go after
parents who believe their children deserve a good quality education and
points out that it is their duty to put their children through a mediocre
education for the good of society. According to Benedikt, these parents who want more for their children are not "all in". The piece stings with provocation throughout, and uses exaggeration to emphasize the main point; "If every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve." This of course could possibly take generations, but the kids will turn out fine. After all, this piece shows you can have a crappy public school education and still end up writing articles for Slate.
3 comments:
Hi Shannon,
Look carefully at this part of the second sentence: "has a reputation for publishing articles that is oppose the majority, even if the stance they are representing is unpopular." A few grammatical glitches here.
Nice work here: " According to www.alexa.com, a website that provides commercial web traffic data, Slate reaches approximately 8.5 million people per month, and reaches more females than males."
As you label the article satirical, the author as taking on a persona, you'll want to ensure that you deal with this assertion adequately in the body of the paper.
Also nicely put: "The piece stings with provocation throughout . . ."
This conclusion is intriguing: you write, "After all, this piece shows you can have a crappy public school education and still end up writing articles for Slate . . ." Not sure (yet) whether this is supposed to ring as sarcastic or genuine, but it has potential.
You may want a sentence or so to open things up rather than launching with the publication date, etc. Slightly abrupt opening sentence.
Benedikt is a fairly controversial writer . . . I'm interested to see how you develop this.
Thank you for the feedback, it caused me to go back and REALLY take a look at my article. I had originally thought that the author was taking on a persona, but now I feel that she truly is that way. I still feel that the article was written just to get people all in a tizzy, which I reference in my paper. Thanks again for the feedback.
Hi Shannon,
Thanks for YOUR feedback. It's always nice to hear when/how feedback proves useful.
I don't doubt that she means to provoke (she recently wrote something that got the interwebz in an uproar about not getting a pet if you want kids, joking that she fantasizes about drowning her dog/cat in the bathtub. It didn't go over well.)
I think provocation will likely prove fruitful for analysis.
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