Persuasive Writing Samples: Media Violence - Informal Tone

The informal toned essay written by Henry Jenkins is a diverse and excellent example of an informal toned piece of work. He begins his work by using a logical fallacy, appeal to ridicule, emphasizing the Virginia Tech shooting, and relating it to how it doesn’t relate to media violence. He also gives statistics to prove his point. In general this persuasive writing example of an informal tone is very significant as it set the standards for future informal toned piece of writing, and acts like a skeleton for us to follow.

He used many statistics and examples to persuade and prove his points. There is an error in the first paragraph, where he says, “On average college students spend more time each playing that (than) reading recreationally, watching television, or going to the movies”. The word “that” should have been replaced by “than”, and the consequence of this, is that it made a bad impression of his work. People will think his writing is not professional and scholarly, and may feel that he’s just a normal citizen, not a professor, writing this opinion piece. But, later on with his rich use of tone, content, and style, he proved that it was just a small mistake, and which overall provided a well written informal toned essay. He proved that a small mistaken, shouldn’t allow a reader to underestimate the rest of the writing, and so should other reads and teachers in society.

The style of this persuasive writing flows as smoothly as ocean tides at night. His paragraphs follow as from one huge well informed paragraph, to a paragraph that is more opinion winged, shorter sentences, which then reiterate his points, from the previous information filled paragraph. He uses high dictions to improve and deliver his piece with passion, and scholarly. He doesn’t use any slang, street language or any colloquial words, even though this is an informal toned essay, thus proves that we don’t necessarily have to use slang or colloquial words in informal toned piece of writing.

Overall, this is a well written informal toned persuasive essay regarding the media violence. He clearly stated his posing points and reasoning to back up, how media violence does not evoke violence in real life. Henry Jenkins has successfully written an informal toned piece of writing that of which can be used as a good example for us to look back, review, help and give some ideas and feedback for us, when we write an informal toned writing.