Mini-assignment 3: Draft 1 of the essay

In the text “Romance: where are you? Who are you? Wait, what just happened?”, the
author Sherry Turkle, a professor of social studies and the author of nine books, argues that
new technologies have changed the rules of love. Strategies Turkle employs to support her
argument include opinion of teenagers, comparison of love with and without tech, and a style
of writing using “you” all through her text.

The author being an expert in social studies could have just use her professional expertise
to write and elaborate the arguments of this text. Instead of doing that, she uses the opinion of
many teenagers, and Hannah is one of them. “Hannah explains”, “as one of Hannah’s friends
put it”,” Hannah insists” and many more like these show how open the author is for external
interventions. This makes her argument even more valid for her audience, viewing that she’s
mainly addressing teenagers who would love to hear the opinion of someone their age.

All over her text, the author is clearly in a constant state of comparison: love with and
without technology. To effectively show how tech has change the rules of love, comparison is
a must, and that’s what the author went for. She mentions rejection, which is something
probable to happen when love is one-sided and mentions how “this makes rejection on social
media five times as great as regular”. She further states how responding with nothing is
something that happens on social media but would not happen in real life. Throughout her
comparison, Turkle is presenting pros and cons in parallel. In the “friction-free” paragraphs,
she states how “without an app, it would not be possible to reject hundreds, even thousands of
potential mates with no awkwardness” which is supposed to count as a +1 for social media.
However, as she proceeds with her argument, Turkle doesn’t fail to mention how social
media is turning falling in love into a “businesslike” issue.

While reading the text, the audience can’t but relate to every little detail the author is
mentioning. The style she uses makes the reader spontaneously relate and want to take
decisions on the long run. The use of the pronoun “you” takes over the whole text making the
reader rethink his life. “You could tell yourself all manner of improbable stories”, here for
example, Turkle is showing the reader one way of how he responds when he’s facing the
nothing response.

Overall, Turkle talks about an issue with high contemporary relevance as the use of
technology is at its peak now. She effectively mentions opinions, different point of views and
comparisons, and she as well keeps her reader attracted to the text and relating.