Essay Fundamentals

1. The author describes a rant as “humorous, knowledgeable, a little angry, a little tongue-in-cheek, and sprinkled with expletives.” The baseball example serves to show how rants rise from differences in opinion, with the ranter portrayed as the wronged, more intelligent person. They also seem to give the impression that rants can be a little out of hand at times, since the baseball writer becomes angered and personal with a man over a third party issue.

 

2.  The internet makes it so people can rant anonymously, without having to directly face the people they declaim. Therefore, they have become much more hostile and more prevalent. There are entire websites dedicated for people to leave rants that more often than not contain things most people would never have the courage to say to someone’s face. They serve as a form of entertainment.

 

3.  The main strength behind the author’s view that the rant can be a tool of “merry-making”  are the examples used. He also analyzes and compares the more well phrased, thought-out essays with ones that are usually criticized to portray certain rants as superior.

 

4. “It would be simplistic to think of blogging as a kind of sublimated ranting, since many blogs are earnestly committed to their subjects, and still more could not be accused of sublimating anything. But blogs do form a part of our cacophonous culture, one in which high-flown and bombastic speech flourishes. ”

 

“The rant is an end in itself, an adrenaline-fueled literary catharsis. That’s the paradox at the heart of ranting—its theatricality usually overwhelms all else, including the desire to change whatever outrage has elicited the rant in the first place.”

 

5. Rants in and of themselves are not good or bad. The level to which they are taken defines them individually. I think that people should usually air their problems directly to the offending party, in a calm, reasonable matter to come to a resolution, but only in dire situations. There is no harm in releasing a little tension in a way that will not just further inflame the confrontation.