Outside Reading: Column

Ten Ways to Jump-start Your Finances
By: Alison Rosen

In this column, Rosen uses different techniques to create a funny column. She makes rediculous claims of her ways to "jump-start your finances". Rosen creates a narratives persona that makes it clear that she is not to be taken seriously, using diction and details along with asking unanswerable questions of the audience. She uses diction that one usually uses when they are joking around, for instance she says things like "don", "suacy", "pluck". The most obvious example of how she uses detail is in the common, sometimes cliche way she words her final sentences and the expressions people use when tryink to get you to do something crazy, ""live a little", "play the odds", "best if what you love is embezzling".
This definitely influenced my response to the piece, if it was not obviously meant to be a piece of humor I would have read it and thought that she was crazy and let it slip from my mind. Since it was funny though, I imagined myself in those situations and it made it a more enjoyabe read.
Appropriate for an AP? No. For sure not, the humor that Rosen uses would be looked at with a definite negative light by the AP graders, either thinking that the writer was not taking it seriously, or was trying to mock them. A serious more authoritative voice would be a much better appraoch for the AP.