Reflective Essay #3 (1/10//10)

Reflective Essay

The Value of College

Published on September 25^th 2007

Andrew Hardin

http://essay.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/the-value-of-college/

This essay describes why it is important for American students to attend colleges. It explains the benefits of attending colleges and consequences of dropping out of colleges. In addition, it explains why attending colleges for some people will result in a chaos.  

The tone of this essay seems to be mixed with sympathy and anger. He expresses praise toward highly educated people who pursue their degrees in colleges rather than those who only go to colleges for parties and their friends. He states that those who go to colleges for educational purpose will “obtain a successful career, and live a wealthy life.” In addition, he wrote that those who pursue degrees on colleges will be “the future of our country”. The diction choices that Hardin used such as successful and future create positive feelings for readers toward people who attend colleges for their educational purposes. This seems to create sympathy tone in this reading. This seems to be the strength of this essay, by using technique such as diction support author’s position in this reading, thus makes his stand clearer to understand.

Then he uses strong diction such as using active voice to produce anger tone. For example, one of the quotes that he used, state that “[Those] people attend college because their friends or girlfriend go there” should not be attending colleges at all.  He uses party as a verb, thus making reader feel negative toward the parties in colleges. He also expresses this by describing history .He states that in 1950s, most people attend colleges solely for their futures and jobs that they could get after graduation of college. Now he criticizes that most students’ priorities for going to college are for parties, not because of learning in college. He also uses static data. He declares that more than 30% of freshman in the famous school, Brown, dropped from college, thus saying that our future is not depend on them. However, this seems to be the weakness of this reading since he creates the anger in his tone by using some of static data and history rather than using diction or syntax. Those seem to create the negative feeling or anger toward those who go to colleges for parties or those who drop out of colleges.

Because of his use of tone, I feel sympathy towards people who go colleges for graduation and their educational needs and feel pity and anger toward other who drop out of colleges or go to colleges just for their friends. His use of tone makes this reading enjoyable to read since it describes them efficiently.

                                                                                              

The tone of this essay seems to be appropriate for AP free response. He creates the tone well by using diction. In addition, it is formal and readers can relate themselves to this article. For those, I laud Hardin.