America, It’s Time: The Case for Reparations

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses the controversial topic of slavery by arguing that descendants of slaves should receive the reparations needed to sustain everything that this country has done to their ancestors. He starts off the essay with a living person, Clyde Ross, who is suffering with his mortgage because of the racist system that has been created for him. By putting a living face to the issue of slavery, Coates personalizes the essay right off the bat, allowing readers to see the problem not just as a general old issue, for the issue affects living people like Clyde each and every day. The added sympathy, pathos, and attention gained by this opening story allows both Coates and the audience to be on the same playing field, and talk about a person who desperately needed help.

Coates then uses various research, historical content, pictures, and old documents to bring the ethos to the table and fully defend his argument, so that the people who are about to criticize him at least see the reasons and the articulations behind what he has to offer. There are various references to laws and acts that have discriminated African Americans, and by noting them, he adds more legitimacy than ever before.

His main argument through the essay is that reparations are a MUST in order for this country to pay its dues and open up to more inclusion and diversity. Like Coates says, it’s like not paying the debt on your credit card. It needs to be done or the money will continue to pile up until it is not worth it anymore. He asks white people to acknowledge the position that they are in, and know it is based on the participation of America benefitting from slavery. Theft has been committed, and by articulating it in a way that touches on all points, he allows his criticizers to gain a different perspective than they originally had.

 

 

Longform Essay: The “Cool Girl” Performance

Longform includes a Best list for essays online that are marked as superior in their content. One of those essays, Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls, really gets the reader thinking about big ideas based on a simple topic: how awesome Jennifer Lawrence is. Usually, buzzfeed articles do not produce adequate material, but Anne Helen Petersen surprises everyone with this essay questioning why this “Cool Girl” archetype exists.

Some highlights of the essay:

1. Starting the stage by bringing the modern age into a familiar person: Jennifer Lawrence. Talking about her being a “normal person” in society’s view by tripping, drinking straight out of the bottle, and being completely flustered and starstruck by other actors. It is an engaging opening that makes people think of someone they ultimately should know and why our society embraces this type of woman, the woman that acts like a man, but is beautiful on the outside. By familiarizing us right away, the essay connects a trivial idea like Jennifer Lawrence tripping to how a certain group of women are treated in a fantastical kind of way.
2. The essay also excels with adding the history of “cool women” from the past and why they were beloved so much just like the Jennifer Lawrences. They were the JLaws before JLaw. The tomboys with the beauty on the outside, that wear jeans but look amazing in a ponytail. By giving insight into Bow and Fonda, we understand how this archetype was created, instead of believing it just came up out of the blue. The insight, along with pictures and gifs, gives historical context while not being incredibly boring. It is a great balance that keeps the reader from stopping it immediately.
3. The overall critique on the “cool girl” archetype is extremely important, especially since the previous “cool girls” like Fonda tarnished their perception because of their beliefs in the long run. A “cool girl”, as said in the essay, is a performance and is mostly a facade because of how society ultimately treat “feminine” women or “masculine” women. The “cool girl” is the balance between, having masculine traits while also being feminine and beautiful. By emphasizing this in the article, you get the audience thinking more about how women are treated n the long run.

Users of Longform ultimately appreciated the humor, funny pictures, historical context, and familiarity with Jennifer Lawrence in this day and age. They loved bringing all of this together to produce an argument of how these “cool girls” are treated in the media and in the public. Because this was just a Buzzfeed article, it probably surpassed everyone’s expectations, believing it good enough to be held as one of the more thought-provoking essays of that year.

Learning from Lobsters

David Foster Wallace writes a captivating essay about a lobster festival is his piece, Consider the Lobster, completely changing a reader’s point of view on the special crustacean. Initially, you think it is just going to be a journalistic report about the festival, where it is located, what it represents, and all of the in between. A report like that would have instantly bored me, and I would have moved on to the next reading in my life. However, this was not just another report. While it is true that Wallace talked about the ins and outs of the festival, while also giving the etymology of the word “lobster”, he also made his essay personable and enjoyable for all to continue reading and wanting more and more.

In the essay, Wallace makes sure at certain points to connect with the audience in a very significant way. By using the personal pronouns, “I”, “we”, “us”, we get a better insight into who Wallace is as a person, and we feel united in one community, as he includes us in everyday situations. That is probably the most important part of the essay that captivated me while reading it. In most essays, it feels very stand-offish, as the writer has been taught since they were very young to not use personal pronouns, and to keep the audience from getting involved. Sure, this is great for professional essays, but even then, it still feels strange. By including the audience with some “we” and “us”, you feel like an insider in this new community, completely included and safe. It is a subtle way to engage the reader, but it is very effective in the long run.

Going along with that, Wallace’s format of the essay is very clever towards the audience. For the first half, he talks about what is expected and puts you in a place where you want to eat the lobster and you feel entitled to because it is just food and there is nothing else to it. Then, in the second half of the essay, he surprises the whole audience by then shifting into the ethical questions in regards to cooking a lobster. He includes pathos in a way where you look at lobster eating in a whole new light, seeing a lobster as a living creature, and worrying about its environment. What starts as a lovely festival of the food turns into an endangered area where the lobsters do not feel included whatsoever in a healthy way. Reading the essay, it made me think of how we should not judge an event based on one point of view. The essay succeeds in what it does by including an alternative point of view that no one would originally think of, reading this at face value.

Incorporating various research and sources, Wallace sustains a significant ethos in his essay, backing it up with knowledge of the festival and lobsters in general. You really get the sense that he gained a substantial amount of information while attending this festival and wanted to share with the world. With a great deal of pathos, ethos, and personable language, Wallace is able to keep the readers wanting more from a traditionally dull topic. Lobsters have become a learning objective one essay at a time.

 

“The Remains of the Night”: A Whole New Medium

In Elizabeth Royte’s “The Remains of the Night”, the author discovers a problem with waste build up, like condoms, at a park and writes about her experience. She used the platform Medium.com to deliver her information, and is able to take advantage of all the website has in order to talk about this important issue.

Throughout the article, she used various pictures to help the reader into conceptualizing what she was describing and talking about in her writing. From pictures of the park, to flowers, to trash all lying around, she uses the Medium platform to give distinct visuals to the reader. One of the biggest visuals that Medium provides is the ability to have text sliding above a giant landscape picture. In a couple of instances, Royte has a large photo of the park and then has a little paragraph of text to talk about the picture. In order to continue the article, you must look at the photo and read the text that goes with it. By using words and pictures interchangeably, Royte allows for a more interactive experience. The photos are so visually stunning that it makes you feel like you are at the park with Royte. This helps her article because the reader is with her when the park is clean and fresh and also with her when it is being trashed. The reader fully gets to understand her argument through the use of this Medium function.

Another part of Medium that Royte uses in her article is the use of pictures on the side of a wall of text. Specifically, Royte uses pictures with statistics on them to show how drastic and important the issue in this article really is. For example, litter costing the US $11.5 billion every year is a staggering amount and gives an economic and financial perspective in what Royte is trying to accomplish. One could see this article as strictly focused on the pathos and emotions on the writer; however, with the use of statistics and facts, Royte legitimizes the logos of her essay and even enhances her ethos because of it. The use of the psychological study of gay men helps put faces to the sexual behaviors, as 25,000 men is a large quantity. The great part about Medium is you are able to click on the image with the statistic and enlarge it, if you wanted to get a full idea of what the image is reporting. This, once again, makes the article more interactive and allows the reader to still want to read the rest of the essay.

Medium also allows you to make a collage of various pictures in order to show depth to the topic you are discussing. Specifically, Royte puts nine pictures of trash together to show the actual proof that this is a consistent problem in parks and should be dealt with as soon as possible. Royte also includes a map of where the park is located, allowing more information and background for the reader to digest. At one point, Royte incorporates a link to a website that somebody made about the litter mob. This gives more context to the situation and gives the reader more material to look into if they wanted to investigate the topic further.

Overall, through the use of Medium as a platform, Elizabeth Royte strengthens her essay in many ways, allowing her issue to be taken in a very serious light.