Rhetorical Analysis of Video Game Violence Essay

Words: 1746
Pages: 7

In my most recent essay I wrote of the violence attributed to video games in light of various shootings and other tragedies that occurred in the past year or so. In this essay I argued that despite their violent content, video games are not completely to blame for acts of violence committed by children. Throughout this essay I tried to convince the reader by, first, establishing my own credibility with video games, then sharing my own experiences with violent games, and providing both empirical data and valuable insight from trusted sources. In identifying my target audience, the reader must first ignore the fact that this was written for my English professor, and imply that it was meant to be written for a blog on the internet so
I thought introducing this new idea into this sentence via parentheses would possibly show that this essay only scratched the surface of problems with the way video games are viewed by the public. Over all I feel that this sentence left the reader with the feeling that I wasn’t quite organized and that I wasn’t sure where I was going. I close this paragraph by telling the reader that I had played video games all my life and I’ve never been in a fight. I hoped to show that if these violent video games did cause violent tendencies in youth , then it hadn’t happened to me. If this tactic worked then the readers may start to doubt the other side before I even gave factual evidence. The next paragraph in the essay is the first of three paragraphs in which I walk the reader through my thesis and support my opinions with evidence. At the beginning of paragraph three I give my opposition’s argument to the audience first in order to cloak my opinions as calm counter arguments so the reader doesn’t think I was on the offensive. I then answer the oppositions concerns with a quote from Steven Malliet. I gave the reader the quote from his article I not only countered to opposing argument but I continued with numerical evidence from the FBI regarding crime rates compared to video game sales. By following these two pieces of evidence one after another I tried to almost overload the reader with information