What Would You Do?

College is a period of time full of hard work, stress, and late nights. Any college student working towards a degree understands and would agree with that. Sometimes it’s tempting on a late night of studying to opt for a pick-me-up, whether the student chooses a coffee or a drug, that’s their choice. “The Last All-Nighter” tells a story about a senior at U.C.L.A. who is having some trouble keeping focused in the final moments before graduating and being sent out into the real world. After graduating and getting a real job, she still continues to struggle with drug addiction.  It even gets to the point where she has to choose if she wants to eat dinner every night or if she wants to continue using. Overall, this piece focuses more on the personal experiences of the author, Kate Miller, and less on the factual evidence which would have made the argument about drug addiction stronger and also much more convincing. Despite the lack of logos, the excessive use of ethos makes the piece seem somewhat convincing but when taken into consideration, the absence of facts makes the author seem unreliable in the sense that she didn’t take the time to research the topic she was writing about. Throughout her essay, she relies way too much on ethos and not enough on logos or pathos, although her argument about drug addiction is valid thanks to her personal experiences. From beginning to end, Miller talks about her personal life and doesn’t include statistics about drug addiction to prove her argument. If she worked a few into her piece then her argument, in its entirety would’ve been more cogent.

A quote that really struck me was, “Uninsured, I chose to pay hundreds for a refill instead of buying groceries. I’d consume far more than my allocated does, then spend sleepless nights tossing and turning, my mind racing and my heart pounding, only to wake up and take another pill with a coffee to compensate.” This goes to show that she was willing to do anything and skip eating food, which is obviously needed to survive, just to fulfill her addiction. This quote also works well with proving her argument because for the same reasons. This entire paragraph proves that she uses way too many paragraphs to explain the same thing over and over again. It gets very confusing and it’s hard to follow at some points. When Miller used this quote, “Eventually, I cared less about balancing alcohol and medication, and more about escaping my dim routine of dependency. My quest for a more polished self became so superficial that I lost track of my goals. It took an old friend to notice the changes,” I thought it was one of the best sentences in her entire paper. It quickly proves to the reader that using drugs to get ahead in life won’t do what you want it to do. With the author arguing that there is no shortcut to maturity and success, she, herself, proves that using drugs even just to keep her awake at night so she could finish her work never meant that she was destined for success. She never took into consideration that her tolerance would increase and that she would have to sacrifice things that we as humans need every day to survive just to feed into her addiction that she thought was helping her. These examples are using ethos because the author is trying to show the audience what happened to her personally and that it basically ruined her life and that no good came out of it at all.

One weakness that I think takes away from the piece of writing is the fact that there are so many different paragraphs that could’ve been put together to make her argument stronger. It seems like her thoughts are unorganized and it gets very hard to understand her main point. In the beginning of her paper, it starts with an opening or introduction to the author’s life during her senior year in college and goes on about how she started doing the drug. I think that this introduction paragraph was too simple and didn’t catch the reader’s attention at all. Starting off the first sentence with a shocking statistic about how many college students use Adderall illegally for their “benefit” would’ve been a much better way to hook the reader and make them want to read on further. In the next paragraph, the author is still talking about her first experience with the drug. I think that this paragraph should’ve been part of the first one because it’s the same topic and tells the end of the story that she already started telling in the previous paragraph.

The fourth paragraph goes deeper into the story about when she really started using the drug, which was after she had already graduated from college and got a job in New York as a paralegal.  She was an English major and was only 23 at the time. In the fifth paragraph, she talks more about her job as a paralegal and then realizes that after working on a three month project that the job wasn’t for her. She also said that it wasn’t worth the “large and consistent paycheck.“ In paragraph eight, she talks about how she started to rely more and more on the Adderall and how she started drinking alcohol to help her sleep at night because the meds had no off switch for when she got out of work. She uses a quote to end this paragraph that I think adds a lot to the piece of writing. It says, “I was now getting high seven times a week, every night a delicate balancing act.” I think that this line supports her argument the most because she’s trying to tell everyone that there is no shortcut to success and that taking and relying on drugs to get you to a successful life, in the long run, isn’t going to work out in your favor. The chances of an overdose were obviously very high for her and that would’ve been the end. In paragraph ten, she finally quits her paralegal job and the health insurance that came with it. She got a new job as an assistant editor at a high profile woman’s magazine but she had no health insurance. Being an addict, she didn’t care what she had to do to get her drugs. This should’ve all been put together into one paragraph. If she told the story all together and then told the reader about the consequences of her actions after, it would’ve proved her argument a lot better and it would’ve been a lot easier to follow.

Although she made a lot of good points from her own personal experience, which does prove to be somewhat convincing, there were more ways to make her piece that much better. If she did a little bit of research on how many college students used some kind of A.D.D. drug to help them focus and used that statistic to prove her experiences that would’ve blown it out of the water. Using logos in an argumentative paper like this makes it a lot more convincing because it shows the audience that you’re trustworthy and that you know what you’re talking about. It also shows that there are scientifically proven facts that using drugs is a bad choice and that nothing good would ever come of using them. I think that using facts like that would’ve made her seem very educated about the topic and that in itself would’ve made the paper much better. I also think that using quotes from other people that have gone through the same or similar experiences could’ve added to her entire paper and made it that much more believable. This is true because when she used her own personal experiences in the paper; it was almost shocking that something like that could happen to someone like her. If she used other personal experiences from different types of people, it would’ve proved that drugs can affect all kinds of people not just college graduates. This would also open the paper up to more of an audience such as people who are drug users and not just college students. It could potentially make them all understand the negative effects of using drugs and make them stop.

Kate Miller was just a senior in college when she started using Adderall. This shows how badly she wanted and needed to use something because she thought she would get ahead. Her argument is trying to prove that even when the going gets tough, the best thing to do is not to turn to drugs or other things that. In the long run, they are only going to hurt you rather than help you get ahead and be successful.  I believe that Kate Miller is a very strong writer but if she used a different technique when writing her paper she could’ve done a lot better when it comes to the convincing the audience.