Author Archives: Ray

My essay is about how music influences teenagers to do drugs by portraying them in a positive light which makes teens more willing to say yes when offered drugs for the first time.Digital essay Digital Essay

After Thursday I had alot more questions for myself about what direction I would take with this essay and how I can I make it better. I felt that I needed to rethink my approach to this essay and make the direction im going and the point im trying to prove more strong and clear. When I read my thesis to myself and then asked”so what”, I knew that I needed to redo it and make it stronger and prove a stronger point.

Thursday also made me think more about how I would approach my digital essay. After Thursday I didn’t feel like the direction I was going with the video was really proving any significant point or was going to persuade people to not do drugs.

Ill probably have to do a thorough over haul of my essay but it should come out to be alot stronger and better if I get it right.

My topic will be about the promotion of drugs in music and how it falsely glorifies their uses and sends the message to listeners who are primarily teenagers that drug use is a good thing. This will be a good topic to write on because the media, specifically music, glorifies the use of drugs which can lead to many teenagers trying drugs for the first time because the want to seem cool or be like their favorite artists.

My thesis will be: The glorification of drug use in music leads to many teenagers trying drugs for the first time thinking that it will make them cool and like their favorite artists.

Three sources I plan to use are a music video, Buckberry- Lit up. In the main chorus of this video, they repeat “I love the cocaine” and portray it as something good that everyone should do. For the second source I will use Pratts Self Reliance as a way to tell the readers that teenagers should be self reliance and not follow what their favorite artist do and say. I will use the general idea of that paper to let teenagers see that it’s important to be self reliant. I will also use quotes to point out specific examples and quotes to show how to go about it in the right way.

For the flow of the paper, I plan to first introduce the topic in the first paragraph and let the readers know what I’m talking about and what point I’m trying to make with this paper. Second I will talk about why drug use is bad in the first place and how it affects your health and life in a negative way. Third I will introduce how music persuades teenagers to take up drug use and in which ways it is done through. I will ten talk about how that in turn affects other people who don’t even listen to those songs. After that I will touch on ways to reduce and eliminate the promotion of drug use in songs. Followed by ways for teenaged to cope with the pressures of society to do these things and how to avoid getting sucked into a life if drug abuse. Towards the end I will tell those who have already been sucked into drug use the reasons to quit and what is the best way for them to go about trying to stop using drugs and get their life back on track.

Media: YouTube; Buckberry – Lit Up W/lyrics

The way that the first intro paragraph of Swift’s Modest Proposal paints the scenery reminds me a little of the setting from the movie Born Into Brothels. Swift mentions mothers along with their  numerous children crowding around the door ways of their houses all begging and trying to get money which is very similar to the scenes from Born Into Brothels.

I didn’t really understand where the text was taking me initially and all I really knew was that it has something to do with young children and trying to reproduce them as quickly as possible.I tried to guess what Swift could possibly be talking about but little did I know that all my guesses were very far off.  He was very careful to specifically avoid stating directly what the topic of the text is until the perfect moment on page 219. I was taken completely aback when i read the line “young child well nursed is, at year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food”. I had to reread the entire paragraph just to believe what I just read and had to laugh a little at how sneaky Swift was at hiding the real topic of the text until that point.

Swift even starts getting technical on how to actually make money for the economy in this fashion by including a whole bunch of math that was, in my opinion, a little too well thought out.This whole thing was basically on big bowl of satire and comedy by Swift to get people to think of how things would be if society had different values that supported something like this.

cannibals!

I started off getting interested in reading Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close in the first 75 pages but now im starting to get tired of reading the book now. I don’t really want to read the stories of Oskars grandparents anymore. The stories of his grandparents were interesting at the beginning but it has come to a point in the book where there are too many of them and they feel old and repetitive. I’m personally more interested in Oskars story than the story’s of his grandparents.

Oskars adventure has continued and it was very interesting to me how he mentions the death of his dad on page 90. To me the way he mentions it sounds a little too casual and it seemed like he tried to us the fact that his dad is dead to get into the apartment, which I thought was kinda odd in a way. Oskar said he would be completely truthful to all the people named Black but I didn’t think he would be able to mention the death of his father so easily and outwardly because we already know that Oskar was deeply moved by the death of his father but he does such a good job of not showing it, you would think he didn’t care at all in the first place.