Thanks David Foster Wallace

To start, I can fully understand why they shortened the article from its original length before putting it into the magazine. That would have taken up the whole magazine...if not need a second issue to fully present to a reader the length of this article. As stated by everyone before, this article was long, wordy, sleep-inducing, and long. However, I really liked the beginning pages as that was when my interest was fresh and I didn't know how long the paper was. DFW really knows how to write with authority. What he writes is interesting and really appeals to the reader, for me anyway. He uses sarcasm a lot and has a style that is very in tuned with younger voters, the audience that he is aiming at, that style being very tongue in cheek, which us younger voters are all about! (not sarcasm).
I think his opening story was very well thought out. He gave us the raw POW story, the constant, how would you feel? definitely made me feel more connected to what he was saying. His very detailed descriptions were powerful in evooking emotion from the reader if anything, and the tie in with sticking with what he believed in was very smart. By using this story and squeezing out all of the pathos he could, he used it to drive the audience into his next argument and it works. Not only is it a heart-wrenching story to use to justify his point, the story was told in a way that definitely grabbed our attention early on and made us involved, as it set the tone he would use for the rest of the paper.
With that being said, the tone was of course very smart and appealing but like Sour Patch Kids, its good, its great, I love them, but maybe in just a 20 oz bag you grab on your way to class, in a 30lb jar? I would definitely get sick and tired of it, quick, and I felt in a similar fashion, that is what happened with this paper for me. My interest dwindled as he began to talk about things that had less involvement with things we had been learning about, POW was in the realm of Vietnam, but the other aspects were hard for me to really get involved in. Which brings me to his point of the "Who even cares who cares".
I felt like the "Who even cares who cares" passage was very true in some aspects. He was saying how young voters don't really care about politics because there's a connection with how politics is brought up in school with student council. He says that politics is not cool and the kids that did student government weren't the cool kids, they weren't the jocks and cheerleaders. I did student government, so I guess I wasn't the cool kid, but I stopped after middle school so maybe I am? I found this kind of contradictory since we all know that student government is basically a popularity contest and only the popular kids win or the person with most friends, so they have to be likeable to win, they have to be cool. Other than that, I think the argument with the lack of interest due to politicans making us feel sad is though a stretch, somewhat true. I think the lack of interest is more of a lack of knowledge by our young voters, a lack of knowledge about how much politics affects us, but definitely not as much as Facebook though.
All in all, I was a fan of the style and tone of David Foster Wallace's paper, it was engagning, relatable and fun to read (at parts); and I saw how the power in style and tone could easily bring in interest and grab the reader and maintain connection with the audience while proving a point without making it boring. I also saw how this could easily be lost with too much writing, since I definitely was hooked at the beginning but slowly began to lose interest. It was a tough read, but I did gain something from it so, Thanks David Foster Wallace.