College as a College Student

Getting sent off to college is a major milestone on the pathway to adulthood, and this

tends to be a pretty challenging concept for most incoming freshmen to tackle. At phase one

youre moving into a shoebox that you and two others will call your new home. Before you

know it, youll be patting yourself on the back for not turning your dirty laundry pink and

choosing to skip that frat party because your chemistry midterm was more important. You will

begin to convince yourself that having the top bunk is a form of exercise and wont realize how

out of shape you really are until youre panting after a ten minute walk to your first lecture of the

day. But dont be too hard on yourself the fact that youre hungover probably has a lot to do

with it. Its no mystery that college tends to get stressful sometimes, and it often encourages

students to express their grievances through many mediums, two of which include online blog

articles and social media platforms such as twitter. Because online student-written articles

showcase relatability through informal, sympathetic language while tweets feature a character

limit, hashtag, and retweeting option, both sources are used as coping mechanisms to alleviate

the pressures of college into comedy.

When college students begin to write columns for their schools daily paper, they dont

think to use big, fancy words that you would only hear at a tea party hosted by Queen Elizabeth.

Instead, they try their best to sound appealing and familiar toward other people with analogous

lifestyles through informal writing. These articles usually start off with an entertaining title and

jump right into the topic of discussion rather than bombarding the reader with a bunch of fluff.

Typically, its easy to establish the authors intended audience just by reading the title of the

passage. In an article like 5 Good Places to Cry at UCSB for instance, the author is most likely
trying to grasp the attention of UC Santa Barbara students because it is likely they are the only

group that will fully relate to the text. By joking about how the lagoon [at UCSB] is mainly

composed of the tears of many years worth of University students and that contributing to it

would give you a fun feeling of community and togetherness, the author is attempting to create

a lighthearted environment that will generate a positive response from the audience, in hopes that

they will want to read on (Daily Nexus). A UCSB student who knows his or her way around

campus would easily be able to capture the image of the lagoon and pick up the satirical element

behind the quote. Setting this relaxed, recognizable atmosphere is a key rhetorical convention

writers use when venting and reconstructing their stress into comedy. In other instances,

profanity is freely used to uphold the informal writing environment to an even higher extent.

Youre probably thinking, are you shitting me?, Alexander affirms after claiming that Storke

Plaza is a suitable place to let a couple tears loose (Daily Nexus). Evidently, informal tone is a

crucial factor that can completely alter the mood of a work, and a device that is regularly seen in

student-written articles that remodel apprehension into absurdity.

Compared to online articles, student tweets serve a similar purpose. The 140 character

limit gives students the opportunity to express their momentary discomfort in a quick and

efficient way. When someone tweets something they feel very passionate or worked up about,

they strive to get retweets from their peers as a confirmation that their content is comical and

relatable. To grasp the attention of their followers and receive this feedback, they aspire to tweet

something they find funny and empathetic to elicit the desired response. One student from UC

Berekeley complains I dont think Im never gonna wake up for my 8 AM #acceptedmy

fate (@KimiaZargari). By tweeting about never having the energy to get up for an early lecture,
students who have the same difficulty dragging themselves out of bed will surely understand

how the author of the tweet feels and will react by retweeting the content. She also adds the

hashtag #acceptedmyfate at the end so that people exploring the tag will be able to navigate the

tweet more easily. This tweet correlates to the Daily Nexus article in the sense that they both

acknowledge hardships in a untroubled, sardonic tone. Posting about these common struggles in

a whimsical way makes people believe their followers will find their words engaging and

hopefully get a laugh out of them. Universally, they are able to demonstrate that if they can

remold their anxiety into comedy, so can anyone else in their times of distress.

Resources such as the Daily Nexus and snippets found on social media platforms like

twitter are very accessible to the public and can be found on the internet or in the form of a

physical newspaper. Whether its by casually refreshing their Facebook feed and stumbling upon

a link, or passing by a newsstand while walking to class, its very easy for people to constantly

come across this media in their everyday lives. Thus, both of these genres are convenient outlets

that student writers use to share their obstacles in a mocking manner with others who are

experiencing the same adversities.

From lengthy advice articles to something as basic as a tweet, its safe to say that there is

always a certain reaction every author is looking for. With the rhetorical purpose of relatability

through informal writing and impulsive features, writers use the genres of online student-written

articles and tweets as an escape from the real world, to view their failures from a more idealistic

perspective, and to laugh about them with their community to create an interconnected sense of

relief.
 Works Cited

1. 5 Good Places to Cry at UCSB." The Daily Nexus. N.p., 15 Mar. 2017. Web. 09 Apr. 2017.

2. Tweets, Kimia ZargariProtected. "Tweets with replies by Kimia Zargari (@kimiazargari)."

Twitter. Twitter, n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.