Television in the Modern Media System - Essay Example

This email is in response to the submission of your article, “TV Watching”. The writing is considerably persuasive; however, there are several areas where the quality can be increased through better analogy and appropriate paraphrasing. The topic selection deserves due credit since it is a mainstream issue concerning everyone in the society, so reader attrition should be low when it comes to the topic. Indeed, there are some very convincing points that you have brought up with regards to this issue and I am certain that readers will find much sense in your claim. As a matter of fact, in this rapidly-evolving world where media have spread across the globe, issues that come with media’s operations should be extensively documented. Here, the point of your argumentative claim becomes relevant. Your type of support includes reason and emotion. Hence, in order to raise the persuasive ability of your article, the intensity of emotion and the clarity of reasoning need to be maximized. In fact, the actual body of the article contains some points worth discussion. The first statement of paragraph 10 is perhaps the most vivid expression of your stance. I would like to appreciate this since you made a clear claim about your argument here; you mentioned how media have become an omnipresent activity and parents are helpless when it comes to monitoring sexual exposure towards children. The benefit of this is that most readers are not fully attentive throughout the whole reading process, so the writing must possess simple straightforward expressions of your principle idea. If one fails to do that, the reader might not be able to understand your point of view and your idea might be camouflaged by wordy expressions and complex structuring.. Therefore, it is highly critical to organize and outline the viewpoint, especially in argumentative essays (Writing Position Papers). Often, you have used research statistics and figures to support your claim. You have mentioned research findings of the American population, which is reasonable since your audience is American; however, there feels a slight insufficiency of supporting statistics in your writing. This is because when one writes about an issue concerning the whole society and people, regardless of demographics, there needs to be a substantial amount of information to notify the scale of the issue and also to support one’s claims. Specifically speaking, statistics about the number of hours young children watch television could have been mentioned to simply suggest the level of exposure. This could also mean the inclusion of any visual representation of statistics like graphs and diagrams to help strengthen your article. And then, your argument could be developed by adding finer details about the issue. However, currently, your article needs more inclusion of facts and figures to enhance persuasion. Also, consider doing an audience analysis here. You article is, predominantly, for the medium-literate population, I presume, so it could be a good idea to keep the non-verbose tone consistent throughout your article. If your article becomes too wordy or too detailed, your reader might lose interest. On the contrary, if you align these points into your article, your article’s credibility will be enhanced. Although your article encompasses all forms of media by using the term ’media’, it stresses more on television and the impact of television viewership on children in general. When you have considered all forms of media, avenues other than television such as internet, newspaper and magazines should also have been extensively discussed. The problem of ‘hyper-sexualized media content’ persists predominantly in television and internet indeed, but magazines also contain a good amount of sexual content. Since the quality of a persuasive article increases as numerous aspects are mentioned, you can talk about magazines that would help strengthen your claim. Most importantly, you built upon your article with a basic structure of a cause-and-effect relationship between teenage pregnancy and media’s ubiquitous exposure of ‘hyper-sexualization’. I want to bring to your attention that developing cause-and-effect relationship is a sensitive a matter since, in the real world, all phenomenon are caused by numerous contributing variables. So, a societal problem such as teenage pregnancy and media censorship must be handled carefully. This means that your article must carve out a precise map of association; whereby media is identified to result in increased exposure to sexual material resulting in teenage pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases. At this point in time, the structure in the article can be improved to create a more comprehensive cause-and-effect relationship. Furthermore, you discussed that parents are responsible for monitoring what children are watching on the television screens but the situation is beyond their control due to excessive media coverage. Additionally, in the next sentence you concluded the article by suggesting that parents should ‘retake the remote’. These two sentences are in contradiction with each other. It is unclear as to which party, parents or media, do you consider as the prime source of influence. As the rules suggest, you need to sum up your article with a vivid expression of your stance, leaving no room for ambiguity. You can add some more material about parents’ opinion on this issue and how they think media is negatively affecting the society. Subsequently, your conclusion will present a well-rounded approach to this issue where national statistics and figures are mentioned along with the subjective opinions of parents. One of the highlights of your article is the conclusive analogy you made between a child watching some hyper-sexualized content and smoking each cigarette. From what I understood, your intention was to signify the slow but harmful effects incurred by children every time they are exposed to sexual programs on the television. It is a well-crafted analogy but, there is one small interpretational issue here; when you consider the effects of this analogy, there is a glitch here. You see, cigarette smoking is a very common habit and although everyone knows the harmful health effects of smoking, we find people smoking regardless. So, considering that people act indifferently towards the effects of smoking, your analogy might lose its influence ultimately by inhibiting the same behavior of indifference. Another important point is how you handled the viewpoint opposite to yours. Your handling of the positive effects of media is, unfortunately, weak. In order to assure a fair usage of the opposing argument, you will have to, first and foremost, review the opposing argument briefly. This is very important because failure to do this gives off an impression of ignorance and lack of holistic perspective about the topic of discussion. Beyond that, you can touch upon some logical fallacies in the opposing argument (Sheehan, Richard, and Paine 221), for instance, media personnel often defend their censorship shortcomings by claiming that they broadcast what the public likes to watch and that it is the responsibility of the parents to monitor children. You can raise this issue up and argue that it is logically-flawed since it is same as feeding a lion with meat while trying to tame it. You could also try to find some irrational assumptions and try to align them in favor of your argument (Sheehan, Richard, and Paine 221). All the above mentioned points need to be smartly incorporated within your article. As stated before, keeping in mind that it is a persuasive essay, you article is a good piece of writing, but some fine tuning is required at some areas. Kindly go through each point carefully as I have specifically separated each advice in dedicated paragraphs. Also, lay utmost importance on the structure of the essay while you add the above mentioned ideas in your article. Thank you. Works Cited Johnson-Sheehan, Richard, and Charles Paine. “Position Papers”. Writing Today. Boston: Longman, 2010. Print: 221-246. Johnson-Sheehan, Richard, and Charles Paine. “Using Argumentative Strategies”. Writing Today. Boston: Longman, 2010. Print. "Writing Position Papers." Study Guides and Strategies. Web. 07 Feb. 2012. . Read More