Throughout my readings so far in The Boston Globe, the one area I have really been drawn to are the opinion articles. Everyone has an opinion, but why do I find myself wanting to know a newspaper writer's opinion? Well, it first starts with what the article is about. Being a kid who grew up in the city streets of Boston for the first 12 years of my life, I was always interested about where the culture is going and how things are changing. This previous article I read was about how the number of kids in Boston are steadily decreasing due to the high end costs of city living. I can totally relate to this article, so I jumped on it (not literally), because it drew my interest. Like any article, some get read mainly because it draws a certain person's interest like how I am always reading the latest sport article by the second. As I began to read this opinion piece, I admired the language. For an example:
"CITIES ARE hot. After decades of decline, demographic, and economic trends now favor urban living as a denser, greener, hipper alternative to suburban sprawl." ~ Renee Loth
These are the first two sentences of the piece, and it may seem like just two sentences, but the language really makes it interesting. The style choice of capitalizing "cities" and "are" jump" out at me. Their is also an argument hidden between these lines, and that is how urban areas are becoming the better choice to live in than suburban areas. So why? That's the question I want to find out, and it allows me to keep reading.
As I continue to read the first two paragraphs, I think that this article is going to be about how cities are more richer than suburban areas, until I get to the third paragraph:
"Boston is at the vanguard of this trend — a thriving, brainy, magnetic metropolis the mayoral candidates were sure to celebrate in the recent preliminary campaign. But all of this dynamism obscures another, not-so-positive trend in Boston: the incredible disappearing family." ~Renee Loth
Even though Boston has all these good things going for it, there is the major problem that is revealed and that is the "disappearing family."
What makes this article so great in my opinion (no pun intended), is how well this piece is structured. The article brings about the good things about Boston, but then towards the middle it talks about the big problem it has. With the mayor candidates down to two, it brings up a big problem that needs to be addressed, and whoever can bring up the best answer could be the new mayor of Boston? Not only does this piece talk about the opinion of making more affordable housing, but it brings up the voting in the mayor candidate race. So this article hits two birds with one stone, and I think that makes it a pretty good piece.
Loth uses good factual evidence to her argument. Numbers don't lie. Everyone loves numbers, and with the facts at the realm of the argument, it makes the reader more prone to the idea that "Hey, she is right."
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