Anna Goldfarb is an advice columnist for The Frisky,
an author of the memoir Clearly, I Didn’t
Think This Through’, and an author of her own personal blog which she
titled ‘ShmittenKitten’. In her article,
published in the opinions section of the Washington post, she explains why she
chooses to keep her relationship status private from social media despite her
interest with the websites. Her article seems to address both the general
public and those who read her blog. In the article, she addresses her readers
in a way that would make us believe that they were not her intended audience,
using terms like ‘my readers’ or ‘my followers’. However, after taking a glance
at her blog I found that she shared it on there as well. This makes me believe
that there was a broader audience than originally intended. For her readers,
she seems to use the article to explain her actions. However, for the readers
who may not be familiar with her blog, she may be encouraging them to step back
when it comes to sharing their relationship on social media. As a humor blog
formerly made fun of her bad dates and bad boyfriends, it turned upside down
when she met her current boyfriend. As she had nothing bad to say about him,
she found there was no way to continue posting about these events. However,
when she gave an update on her romantic status, she felt overwhelmed by the
amount of feedback she got on it. As a hater of couple bloggers herself, she
felt as if she had almost betrayed her audience and single friends by shoving
her relationship status in their face. This led to her to take a step back when
it came to blogging about her relationship status, refusing to post anything
else involving him at all. To convince her audience to do the same, she uses
several different rhetorical strategies. First, she keeps a satire and narrative
tone to her article, presenting an almost relatable understanding to the
reader. Following that, she even goes so far as appealing to logos by sharing a
study performed on Facebook by the Science of Relationships. Basically, it
argued in favor of her point by saying “… Users
who overshared (“Pining away for Jordan…I just love you so much I
can’t stand it!”) were judged to have good relationships, but they were
also declared the most unlikable,” (para 10). Despite the suddenness of the
logos, I felt that it was well placed in an article I was expecting to be
entirely opinionated. However, I felt that when reading the article, there was
something missing. I wasn’t sure, and still cannot be sure, what it was. For an
article that reached nearly 900 words, it seemed very limited in its approach
to make an argument. Goldfarb, as a blog writer, seems to focus more on making
her narrations humorous or eye catching than actually provided sufficient
information in order to make her statement. Perhaps I find a bit more logos in
an argument that is surrounded mostly by narration would do well. However, I
got her point. The problem is that I was not quite convinced. Now, I’m in no
relationship myself. Though I expect that if she can barely even convince me to
give more than a “Yeah, okay,” to this article, I do not believe she’d be
successful in convincing a person in their own relationship to approve any
more.
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