Outside Reading Set #3: Reflective Essay

1/8/11

“It’s Inconvenient Being Green”

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Reflective Essay

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1686805,00.html

In “It’s Inconvenient Being Green,” Lisa Takeuchi Cullen reflects on her growing concern over her lack of eco-consciousness. The musing, wry tone of the piece suggests that Cullen is not the only one afflicted by “eco-anxiety.” Immediately in the title, Cullen alludes to Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” She implies that there is a new inconvenient truth: oftentimes, it just takes too much effort to be environmentally friendly. Therefore, when Cullen describes extreme examples of “green” actions, her tone is gently mocking, since she knows that the average person does not go to such lengths to combat eco-anxiety. In particular, she paints a slightly foolish picture of her own inadequacies: “Like the bear in the commercial, I squeeze it tight. I like my toilet paper. I like it a lot."

Cullen’s effective use of parenthetical remarks, such as “(or 52 square meters, which sounds a lot better)” and “(or 55,636 km, which sounds a lot worse)” add to the feeling of “eco-anxiety” that she describes. Cullen thinks a loud in a series of examples, employing the power of three to emphasize her point and add to her musing tone. In addition to using metaphors such as “Mine is the Sasquatch of carbon footprints. Anxiously I ponder the ways I might reduce my shoe size” to create comic effect, Cullen plays with sentence structure to maintain her dry, humorous tone. In particular, she tends to lead with a clause that sounds serious, but immediately follows that clause with a somewhat silly comment, as demonstrated by “I have seriously considered banning Christmas gifts this year to avoid the senseless consumption of sheer stuff, but I don’t want my kid to say she saw Mommy dissing Santa Claus.”

Cullen’s casual, lighthearted comments draw me into her piece. Though she seems to be mocking the futility of rousing everyone to environmental action, her sarcasm is more playful than dark; this makes her seem much more approachable to the reader. Cullen’s effective communication of her reflection is another major strength of her piece. Often in reflective essays, authors tend to lose readers by adopting a much less focused, musing tone. Cullen’s writing, however, has a very good balance between reflection and analysis; as a result, her point is always fairly clear. The weakness of this piece is its occasional repetition of sentence structures. While this repetition sometimes helps clarify the point, it becomes a little boring after a while. Cullen’s writing is probably not suited for the AP exam because it has many fragments and colloquial terms. The casual tone works for this piece but probably not for the exam.