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.
