Close Reading #2

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/for-teenage-smokers-removing-the-allure-of-the-pack/



        For my close reading, I've chosen a piece entitled "For Teenage Smokers, Removing the Allure of the Pack", by Tina Rosenburg at the New York Times. Rosenburg argues that the American people are not doing enough to discourage high school students from beginning a lifelong habit of smoking cigarettes. Rosenburg utilizes good persuasive techniques and uses imagery, details, and syntax, while effectively keeping the readers attention throughout her argument.
         The strongest part of Rosenburgs argument stems from her generous use of detail. Her well researched argument is chock full of good examples and astonishing statistics. Much of her argument is based on the "cool factor," because she believes that "kids take up smoking to be cool, to impress their friends with their recklessness and defiance of adults." Rosenburg attributes much of the fault to advertising as well as smoking scenes in movies. She says, "Leonardo DiCaprio’s smoking in 'The Titanic' movie will kill far more people than the 1500 who died in the ship accident." She provides this opinion, then follows up with a real life example to prove her point. She further discuses something called the Truth Campaign, a campaign that "took the teenage desire for rebellion and turned it against the tobacco companies." She follows this up with the statistic that "when Florida started the Truth campaign, 27.4 percent of its high school students were smokers. Just two years later, that figure had fallen to 22.6 percent." These details are well thought out, aren't repetitive, and are effective in persuading the reader.
        Rosenburg uses specific imagery to help explain her many alternative strategies to keeping kids away from smoking. She argues that by making "all cigarette packs look alike — a generic olive-green, with big health warnings and the brand name written in small, standardized lettering," teenagers will be less inclined to buy them, for it erases this so called cool factor of pulling a flashy pack out of your purse.
        A question is not always an effective way to start out a piece of writing--even an editorial--but in this case, it's just right. Rosenburg asks the question, "Remember teenage smoking?" in this blunt, almost sarcastic kind of way. She goes on to compare our efforts to reduce teenage obesity that may be interfering with, in her opinion, an even more important issue: teenage smoking. Rosenburg keeps a casual conversation, continually asking the reader questions, and often answering them herself. She states, "Since 1997, we’ve learned a lot about how to prevent teenage smoking. The best strategy? Make smoking uncool." When compared with something like "the best strategy to prevent teenage smoking is to make smoking uncool," the difference is obvious. One is a casual, but strongly opinionated phrase, and the other is a boring sentence you're going to forget about by the time you're done reading the article, if you haven't gotten so bored that you've already stopped reading completely.
        Rosenburg has created a fresh take on a old and increasingly popular opinion: the teenage smoking rate in this country. She uses all of that detail and imagery and structures the piece in a way that is beneficial to her argument and effective in her persuasion techniques.