The essay “Death, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” by Lauryn Daniels focuses on the issue of drug use at music festivals, and the lack of control for the issue. I think Daniels’ use of diction makes her essay effective and her argument is stronger because of it. Daniels uses words that are more advanced and make sense to her target audience, festival officials. She does not waste time explaining things that the audience would already know about festivals. Daniels also takes advantage of kairos in this essay. Music Festivals have been festivals have become very popular in the past couple years, and they continue to get bigger and bigger each year. This also means drugs increasingly become a problem for festival officials to figure out. As more and more youth attend these festivals, drugs become easier to access and the risk gets higher and higher. Daniels argument is automatically made stronger by how prevalent this issue has become.
Her target audience is very clearly people who run music festivals, as her argument is about controlling the use of drugs in this setting, however, I do think Daniels spends most of the essay explaining why drugs are bad rather than how festivals can improve drug control. Daniels’ paragraphs are broken up by the different dangers festival drug use can bring, and she proves her points mainly through quoted articles on similar subjects. I do think Daniels is lacking in statistical evidence, which would help her back up the claim that this issue is as large as she describes it to be.
E110 FA19 Class Blog 