Rhetorical Critique of Sylvia Mathews Burwell “Generation stress”. The Generation Gap Essay Example

In November /December of 2018, Sylvia Mathews Burwell wrote the article  “Generation stress” to have individuals comprehend that the present understudies face a greater deal of stress than some other generations before. Sylvia Burwell's communication with the audience about how the youth age appears to show up at college with less resilience, as well as a lower craving for danger and disappointment is effective because she gives real life statistics and evidence to back up her thoughts. 

In her article, Sylvia first sets the stage by showing that in a 2016-17 Healthy Minds study, that many students reportedly experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as that the percent has grown from Six percent in 2007 to 11 percent in 2017. I believe this shows that Sylvia’s techniques were effective. Sylvia continues by discussing that “Even though more students are getting help, only a little more than half of those with symptoms of depression and anxiety had received treatment in the previous year”(Burwell 150). Sylvia is trying to point out that many students have experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety than the older 

Generations moreover, that “they may not quite understand the stress put on the students as well as how the percentages over the past year have increasingly risen from the difficulties that life brings you as you grow up and become responsible as you attend college”(Burwell). As well as that, to balance the natural challenges and stress the university life presents while supporting your own emotional well-being just as others around you is increasingly getting more difficult to do as we go through a pandemic, as well as in general with the stress of responsibilities we have in college. 

Throughout her piece, Sylvia uses many strong examples that strengthen her stance on students' stress, as well as to build her argument on how past life can affect their stress levels now. One example that I believe truly showed that students go through a lot of stress from their past life experiences is when Sylvia said “ parents have focused more on protecting them from stress and anxiety and less on teaching them how to cope”(Burwell 154). I think this consequently shows that it all depends on how our parents taught the student to handle failure and if we have failed in the past, what was the experience you had from it. Because some parents will have their students purposely fail or make life harder for them to have the students experience and see that life isn't perfect as well as that they won't succeed at everything in life, in specific college aspects of things. Nevertheless, we will have more stress from not being able to accept failure. 

Sylvia added how past experiences have affected recent pressures in universities, she said: “Becoming so used to winning makes it all the harder to deal with losing. It makes it harder to learn resilience”( Burwell 154). This can impact the students' stress in a tremendous way since students haven't experienced as much failure in schooling or in general everyday life, so by the time they get to college the stress raises which causes more anxiety and depression which relates to the first topic I said about how percentages have increased dramatically over the years to the point                                                                                                                           

Where older generations may not understand the stress put on the students as they enter a new chapter in their lives. Along with Sylvia’s strong examples that strengthen her stance on students' stress. Sylvia’s introduction is full of phrases and emotionally-charged words that create an aspect of students losing their college years due to lack of failure and additional stress created; Sylvia notes that “ Resilience is about decreasing students ‘ sense of overwhelming stress while fostering their growing autonomy to tackle difficult life challenges”(Burwell 150). The image Sylvia displays explains how the lack of real life situations, moreover failure can affect students in a very populated way that can cause stress, which causes anxiety and depression and leads to other negative situations. As well as that failure has a very big impact on our life’s because failing in life helps to build resilience. The more we fail, the more resilient we become. In order to achieve great success, we must know resilience. Because, if we think that we're going to succeed on the first try, or even the first few tries, then we're sure to set ourselves up for a far more painful failure.

Although Sylvia begins the article with only stating how stress has an impact on our lives and has increased over the generations, she progressively gets deeper into why failure in our earliest ages and how our parents taught us growing up can negatively affect our lives in the college aspect and lead to other things such as; depression and anxiety.