E110 FA19 Class Blog

While in the 11th grade, Maya Walker began suffering from serious mental health issues. Ongoing feelings of loneliness, and discouragement, even lead to thoughts of suicide. Maya’s friends never took notice of her struggles after gradual conversations with them. Maya later found the root of the lack of notice. Which was an acclimation to suicidal tendencies, that are of core values in today’s memes. Throughout Maya’s battle, depression and suicide meme’s were a form of comfort that she could not find in her friends or anything else. This comfort grew to be soothing, but generated some unhealthy mind patterns. Maya realized that if a certain meme or joke about suicide was brought up, it was followed by relatable laughs. Or a joking response of “same”. Instead of having compassion and concern towards someone for their struggles, jokes were often the alternative. Maya painfully explains how she observed a growing nonchalance towards depression. The way that teenagers today are handling depression is making it hard to distinguish jokes from cries for help. 

    Maya’s biggest tactics of argument were given through the concepts of “ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos.” In other words, authority, emotion, logic, and urgency. The authority that Maya was able to display was a key strength to her story. The biggest aspect of authority given, was her own personal vulnerability. Sharing her own story, battles, and observations really gives her immense authorization over the matter. This gives Maya a sense of control over the reader. The reader essentially takes a step back, and absorbs all of the informative and emotional details that the writer has to offer. Maya also enhances her authority by giving different types of examples and sources. Maya used different health statistics from the “U.S. Department of Health and Human Services”, as well as different examples of memes from Twitter that relate to mental health victims. 

Maya Walker wrote “To Meme or Not to Meme”, an article calling attention to dark humor in memes. It discusses how memes normalize mental health issues and results in the inability to recognize serious cries for help. Overall, Walker successfully utilized various rhetorical strategies to build a strong, well developed argument. She begins her essay by appealing to pathos in telling her previous struggles with depression. Once the audience’s attention is captured, Walker gives some background on memes as a whole and then the dark humor memes that her article focuses on. She uses various credible sources, such as universities, while also adding in screenshots of the type of social media accounts she is talking about. This consistent flow of information and explanation appeals to ethos. Additionally, Walker’s diction is noticeably formal when explaining her sources. This begins to add on to the ethos that she has already established, however her diction begins to turn into a less formal one as the article goes on. This in turn makes her lose a bit of credibility, but it doesn’t take enough away from her previous successes for the article to be successful as a whole. The most notable rhetoric device is the appeal to kairos. Walker chose a topic that was relevant to Generation Z, and it most likely will remain relevant for future generations as well. “To Meme or Not to Meme” has many elements necessary to make a clear, strong argument. It utilizes an appeal to ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos in such a way that, even if the audience does not agree with the author’s opinion, they can come to terms with the author’s validity as a writer.

In the article To Meme or Not to Meme, the author, Maya Walker, uses her own experiences in life to show how detrimental social media can be to a person if used negatively. She uses a personal account of how social media endangered her but also shares how she was able to block out the things that made her feel less than important.  Social media has gone from a place that people go to to vent and feel better about themselves to a place that people are afraid to be themselves. 

The author argues throughout the article that social media is the ruination of mental health. Social media has become a staple of so many people’s lives over the past decade. Everywhere you look, people are posting about their latest vacation, the newest addition to their shoe collection or the fight they just had with their friend. People have turned to social media as a friend more than they would an actual person. While some people may try and inflict pain on someone on purpose with their posts, others may not realize how hurtful a post can be to someone and accidentally trigger someone’s unstable mental health. The world has become so numb to such important subjects like mental health that it is a topic that is too often overlooked. 

The main mode of persuasion shown in this essay was kairos. The way the author was able to establish kairos is by talking about social media, a huge part of many people’s everyday lives. By talking about such a common and popular topic, she was able to appeal to such a large audience. There have been many people who have been questioning their life. They have been in a horrible place in life and turn to social media to try and save them and sometimes that just isn’t the case. Brutal people and those who do not care about the mental health could very well be the reason people lean towards ending their lives. Seeing people make fun of your pain could be tough and seeing that when you’re so hurt can be deadly. Making something this well-known something you talk about is an important part of awareness.

In Maya Walker’s essay, “To Meme or Not to Meme”, she argues how social media memes are negatively affecting people’s mental health. She claims that because of how open society is becoming with talking about suicide and mental health problems, there has been an increase in depression-related memes. These memes are often humorous, which can be very triggering to some people. 

To support her claims throughout her essay, she appeals emotionally to her audience – which is very effective. She describes experiences from her own life and how internet memes played a role in her depression and mental health issues. These tactics make the reader feel more empathy towards her, which creates greater interest in her essay and ideas. She also presents logical information with credible sources, including the US Department of Health & Human Services and the American Psychological Association. Along with this, she includes many specific examples of memes from social media to help people better understand what she is talking about. This helps strengthen her argument and convince readers that social media memes are negatively affecting people’s mental health. Maya Walker used many strong tactics to create a more convincing argument for her thesis in her essay, “To Meme or Not To Meme”.

In the article “To Meme or Not to Meme” by Maya walker, she argues about how social media memes have an impact on people’s lives by talking about health issues. Supporting her thesis by everything in the essay connecting to the relationship between memes and mental health. Maya wants the people on social media to take a second and recognize the impact memes have. She shows her emotion in the first paragraph when she talks about how she wanted to commit suicide. Maya used most recent evidence that is online to attract the audience to her thesis. Proving that these sources agree with her main point. That is causing the readers to feel sympathetic towards her situation. She made them feel this emotion by just giving some background. Some memes bring laughter while others bring sadness. This essay works because Maya supports it with her emotions. For example, she talks about her mental health was affected when it comes to social media memes. Maya showed that you do not have to go to social media to get your point across you can simply go to someone that can help you.

In Ben Schlusser’s Essay, “Progress Built on a Wasteland: Electronic Consumerism & the Dangers of E-waste”, the main view is that humans constantly buy new electronic products, and this increases the amount of waste that becomes present on the planet. The waste causes numerous environmental problems and dangers. The author does a good job at conveying that change is needed, or else our planet may be destroyed, but he uses mostly factual and logical evidence. His lack of emotion may not appeal to every type of person. For example, someone who is easily convinced by facts and logic may agree with this essay and advocate for change, but someone who needs emotions to act on something may not see this essay as appealing. However, the essay does explain to the reader that change is necessary through its abundance of examples of the tactics that companies use on consumers. It is clear to the audience that this excessive consumption of electronics is detrimental to us and the environment.

By – Cole Cantagallo

“Antibiotics & Superbugs: The Future of Health,” by John Bachman-Paternoster, is an essay written to enlighten readers about the truth of antibiotics. Obviously antibiotics play a major role in everyone’s life today, but most people don’t know the effects of overusing or misusing them. This is a problem because bacteria evolve just like any plant or animal does. So, the bacteria, whether good or bad, evolves in order to fight off medicines. After bacteria evolve however, they become “superbugs,” which makes them resistant to almost all of the medicines we use. Although antibiotics are good for killing the bad bacteria, there is also the risk of antibiotics killing the good bacteria. The killing of good bacteria weakens your immune system and makes you prone to more illnesses. It is also important to know that as the years go on, there is an increase of not needed prescriptions of antibiotics. One of the consequences of not using your prescriptions correctly is that patients stop taking their antibiotics because they think their illness is gone. When in reality it’s still there just evolving and it will eventually come back stronger then before.

This essay is written very well and the author used a lot of examples. The examples and quotes he used were supported with plenty of information that came from credible sources. On another note, the author did an excellent job putting his emotion in the essay to really get the information to the reader.

In the article “To Meme or Not to Meme”, the author, Maya Walker, demonstrates the relationship between mental health issues and social media, as she shares her own experiences, and later provides knowledge and research about this issue. Walker argues that joking about mental health issues on the internet will worsen the overall health and well-being of our generation and this trend needs to stop. She effectively presents this argument and uses successful tactics of persuasion, including her evidence, credibility, emotional appeal, and organization to convince her audience.  

The author presents the argument that memes about mental health issues are dangerous and will be destructive to our generation’s mental health. We learn this thesis at the end of the first paragraph after she describes her own experience with the issue. The audience includes “Gen Z”, people who use the internet, people who struggle with mental health, and adolescents. Walker wants the audience to realize how dangerous the internet can be especially when adolescents can be so vulnerable online. The author supports her argument by following all her claims with expert evidence, including a university, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and a clinical therapist. This really strengthens her argument by backing it up with a reliable source. Possibly her strongest technique, Walker draws emotion by sharing that she thought about suicide and addresses how serious the topic is for her. Finally, the relevance of the issue is one of the most effective convincing strategies because before the reader even reads the essay, they already use social media every day and may experience the risks she talks about. The important thing to take away from this is that Maya Walker effectively presents and supports her claim in “To Meme or Not to Meme” and convinces the reader to believe her thesis. 

By: Jake Stein

Ben Schlusser’s essay “Progress Built on Wasteland: Electronic Consumerism & the Dangers of E-waste” explains how e-waste is affecting everyone. His essay is very affective because of his use of examples and his extensive knowledge of the subject.

Schlusser selected quotes that not only support his claims very well, but they also draw out his readers emotions. One example of a quote that he pulled out was the one about the Chinese farmer. After e-waste started getting dumped outside of his village, his sheep started dying, his plants withered and seven of his neighbors died of cancer.

Schlusser demonstrates his extensive knowledge of the subject by leading his readers into the subject with a great amount of information. He proves that he is knowledgeable before going into depth on the subject.

Schlusser’s work on the e-waste subject was pretty good. There were no major flaws, however it could have been improved. Schlusser is very good at picking out emotional quotes. He could have implemented more of these in his essay to really grab the reader’s attention.

As a result of the extremely harmful side effects, consumers and producers should decide between beauty and health. The article states, “Two popular but dangerous examples are acrylic and gel nails, which are infused with ingredients including toluene, formaldehyde, DBP, and, most notably, methacrylates.” Acrylic nails are the fake nails you paste on when you want to look more presentable or if you have really short nails and want them to look longer. This is one of the most common ways girls do their nails which is really horrifying to hear after reading this article. Methacrylate is being used in acrylic nails which can “damage the human respiratory system, but they also have the reputation of damaging the nervous system”, as stated in the article. The other popular but dangerous nail structure is gel manicure. I use to get gel manicure for 5 years until my nails started to break because of how weak they were. My mom use to also hate how they use the UV light to dry your nails cause it is known to cause health problems. For this reason I switched to powder gel. 

Mya Soukaseum uses style to build up the emotion and authority aspects of the argument. She does this by starting out her article with the text, “When we as consumers are concerned most with the final results of the products we use, we render ourselves blind to the true nature of what lies behind flashy, meretricious packaging.” This shows and proves that everything is not always what it seems or looks. The tone the author uses is worried, troubled, and anxious. By constantly using style to build up emotions of the argument, Soukaseum captures the audience to keep reading.