Exploring Thompson Alex Schlack

Alex Schlack  

RWS100        

Chris Werry

9/4/2014

Exploring Thompson

            One thing I was curious about from Clive Thompson’s text was his order of things, I would ask him why he organized it the way he did, starting off with the Biography and then getting into the interviews and then the statistics, I feel it would have been more convincing to talk about the various different journalist and scholars and then follow with all those facts about words per day etc. and then finally introduce the grandma anecdote and other factors that helped him compare the present from the past. The other thing I would ask him would have to be what his should intention and primary purpose behind this passage, I wonder what effects he was expecting this to cause or have come out of.  The two most persuasive parts of his text were the listings of al the statistics, because it made you shocked at how many tweets there were per day, words typed and so on.  Throwing out facts like that is important in a persuasive essay because you have credibility that can influence a reader’s perspective.   The other was the biography at the beginning, that helped show the audience how powerful expressing your thoughts and emotions in words can be, how she became famous through writing and how everyone appreciated her blogs about relatable events.  The two least persuasive points were the interviewing of the grandma and including all of those different scholars and their perspective.  The grandma interview had a good purpose but Clive should have added something else to tie with it and prove his point even further, he needed more evidence to show the huge difference from how much people read and write today compared to thirty or forty years ago.  And he added too many professors and with their attached opinions, he could have achieved the same amount of persuasion without convoluting the text with too many sources of information.  The main idea behind starting off with the Kenyan blogger was to introduce the theme and message he was trying to get across to everyone.  He wanted to prove that through social media and just writing in general, this person became know and recognized for her blogs. Which is something that definitely couldn’t have happened in the past due to lack of technology.