Media violene (formal tone)

As a reader, I didn’t find this persuasive piece of writing very strong. In fact it sounded more informal than formal simply because it didn’t use suitable techniques, high-quality vocabulary and tone. Though it used some rhetoric questions, the author could have still used more techniques and devices to make it more effective. The main idea of this piece was that violence is an issue that our society has been facing for years. In addition, there were errors such as at times the author would use the word “television” but at other times the author would use the short term “t.v.” , “Violence on t.v. is very common today as it was 30 years ago”. Also the author wrote numbers instead of writing them as words, “For example, boys ages 10-14, who saw "parental discretion" advisories”. Although the author provides supporting evidence that television can cause violent behavior for children, then it focuses on the idea that “for the most part, most television is neither helpful nor harmful”. Thus, it was very puzzling and it confuses the reader and doesn’t make this piece very convincing since the bias gets taken away.

This piece could have been better if the author used better facts, evidences, example, and structured the essay properly. It shows that the author doesn’t know what he/she is talking about because the facts used weren’t in-depth, he/she could have gotten into it more details and explained it more. The reason why I find this piece more informal than formal because the author used this sentence, "As you can see this conclusion is quiet vague, and does not give a lot of crucial information for us to correct and improve” and “There are also a number of other factors that influence the way television affects people such as: attitudes, knowledge, interests, how much t.v. you watch, etc”. As a reader, you can tell that the author did not edit his/her work properly or put much effort into this writing.

The author could have used combination of short and long sentences like the editorial on media which was informal. The main idea of the essay wasn’t clear which means that the author failed to get his/her point across to the reader. What I found really irritating was that first the author states an evidence that supports the idea of media violence influencing teenagers but ended up by stating that there are other factors that lead to violence other than the media. Thus this editorial includes hasty conclusion and base rate fallacy (uses weak evidence to make a judgment without taking into account known empirical statistics about the probability). It confuses the reader about which side of the argument the author is trying to support. The author also used red herring (an argument that is not related to the central discussion) for example, “boys ages 10-14, who saw "parental discretion" advisories, PG-13, and R ratings on programs found these more attractive”. It is not a relevant point, because it doesn’t support the author’s central point on media influencing the youth.

This persuasive piece lacked many techniques, contractions, reader’s inclusion, and use of proper vocabulary which could have made this piece much clearer. The way the essay was structured was poor as well, it didn’t flow adequately. Although it had an introduction, body paragraph, and a conclusion, because of the lack of various techniques and elements of writing, the whole essay sounded weak.