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Jonah Mendoza

15 July 2019

ENGL-1302

Short Academic Response #1

In Brooks' essay, he talks about how young people in the modern generation tend to

struggle with starting adulthood. With college graduates being the focus of the text, he uses them

as an example for the audience to prove his point further in order to encourage others to not

follow the same issue that Brooks has claimed.

While the essay talks more about Brooks’ perspective of the young people in general

rather than providing factual evidence, Brooks’ uses ethos by specifically explaining how

students usually find different jobs that best suits them. In his own opinion, he provides a reason

why the “baby boomer theology” is the worst of all and it has always been stuck on the young

people’s mindset. Not only that, Brooks also objects the idea of expressing individualism

because it doesn’t reflect on everybody and it can create misleads in their lives.

The text may not have pathos to change the audience’s thinking with Brooks’ arguments,

but it does utilize logos to make the argument reasonable enough for the targeted audience to

understand the connections of Brooks’ claims. According to the text, Brooks says that college

graduates are sent into a world full of limitless possibilities. He goes on to say that young people

don’t look inside and plan their lives but rather they look out and find a problem which summons

their life. Brooks illustrates a picture related to his argument of the graduates for the new

generation being the most supervised in American history. He implies that people make their

own successes by going into the real world and create a life of their own. The reason why he
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believes that it’s not about finding themselves and planning a life is because not everything in

life can go as it originally planned to be.

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Works Cited:

Brooks, David. “It’s Not about You.” Everything’s and Argument. Andrea A. Lunsford and John

J. Ruszkiewicz. 7th ed.