Taking Chances: Exercise 19, Ms Anita Crossway, p. 32
Taking it further: write sentences relating to the author’s tone and point of view:
- Ms Crossway’s sharp /high-minded tone is likely to shame parents who have become too protective of their children.
- In a high-minded tone, Ms Crossway reminds parents about the rights of children.
- Ms Crossway condemns parents in a sarcastic way for their tendency to protect their children to excess.
- The author is sceptical of the use of the tags especially because of the French company’s reluctance to use them.
Techniques: How do these language choices show the author’s disapproval of the Tag?
- metaphor with negative connotations: the metaphor compares parents with a hovering and swooping helicopter. The author sets up parents for ridicule and expects that they will recognise the folly associated with the use of such Tags.
- an appeal to common sense: Ms Crossway believes that sensible parents will give children the opportunities to explore the world on their own and grow up without being constantly watched or reminded of the world as a fearful place. Children who wear such a Tag are always reminded of danger. Ms Crossway’s common-sense approach pre-empts a rational response in parents to allay fears about the exposure to danger. This is also an appeal to duty of care and parents’ sense of responsibility that differs from the previous author’s.
- an appeal to privacy: Ms Crossway is concerned that the tags are undermining privacy and infringing the rights of children. This is an indirect appeal to privacy.
- hyperbole: “Has the world gone so mad…” and “we treat them as if their every move in the big wide world needs a security guard”. These references to a “mad” world and our excessive anxieties that lead to security-guard protection of children are examples of dramatic exaggeration.
Taking it further: paragraph practice, p. 32 (Build a paragraph)
(View/tone) In a practical tone, and from her disinterested perspective as Parents’ Watch chief executive, Ms Crossways believes that parents’ unhealthy obsession with security is counter-productive to sound parenting. (language choices/ technique and position) Using generalisations and an appeal to responsibility, she shames parents into recognising that an obsession with security is absurd and is curbing children’s growth opportunities. Simultaneously, she exhorts parents to see the practical consequences of their obsessive behaviour. (Link between language choice and impact/purpose) Her rhetorical question – “Has the world gone so mad? — hyperbolically suggests that they are acting likely “security guards”, which challenges parents to see the folly of their excessive control and implies that they are absurdly anxious. This claim is reinforced by the metaphor of “panic-stricken helicopter parents” that carries negative connotations and once again impugns their parenting style which has a tendency to “swoop and hover” to the detriment of their child’s development. She reinforces her claims with evidence from the manufacturer, Bluelinea, and its reluctance to use Tags to show that she is not biased.
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