Identity Crisis Under The Ink Essay

Looking at Tattoos from a Modern Perspective

When you read an article or piece of text, do you ever realize that there really is more to what the author is trying to say than what meets the eye? It’s like an onion. When picking apart an article, you have to peel back the layers of it one at a time, to understand the deeper meaning for why an author writes it the way they do. This is what I had to do, when analyzing ‘The Identity Crisis Under the Ink’ by Chris Weller, using rhetoric. When briefly skimming this article, one would gather that the importance of the article was that tattoos are more popular now than ever, and that the majority of people getting tattoos are millennials. When digging deeper into this article, the bigger meaning

It started with a story of the authors past to interest and grab the reader’s attention. The author then analyzes his own story and comes up with his thesis, that tattoos don’t just express identity: they help define it. After that, he backtracks to the past of tattoos, visiting statistics on how many people used to get tattoos in the 1960’s. He works his way to a study done in 1998, and then finally talks about the modern era, how they redid the same studies, and how many people have tattoos now a-days. Lastly, he goes on about the study’s findings, and why it all supports his thesis. I think the organization follows a comparison cluster pattern, comparing what tattoos used to signify and what they mean for people now. I think this is a very meaningful way to cluster the information of the article because it helps people see the past statistics and studies, and how they compare to today. It gives readers a history and background on the information so they can understand how things have

Looking at the style of this article, I think it reflects that. The article is written in a way that is easy for readers around my age to follow and understand, but also has a sense of sophistication, unlike a lot of topics and articles I have read on Buzzfeed or The Onion. It does not use a lot of slang, but uses decent sized words and has a certain level of technicality, which points to the intended audience. I think the author is trying to target people around my age/millennials, because if we are the age that has seen the greatest increase in tattoos, we would want to be the one’s reading why our generation feels the need to get tattoos in the first place. I think another intended audience would be people above the age of millennials, because tattoos were not popular when they were growing up. A lot of older people question why the younger generation gets tattoos and like to permanently mark their bodies, and this article is an explanation for them. It not only gives millennials a justification, but it gives older people an