The article, "Yes teen fiction can be dark - but it shows teenagers they aren't alone" by Maureen Johnson, is an article that responds to the controversial article, "Darkness Too Visible" by Megan Cox Gurdon. The central idea of the article is that although some young adult books are full of dark problems, they help teenagers understand that they aren't the only ones going through those problems. The author supports this claim by showing what Megan Cox Gurdon actually meant in her article and how her meaning of horrible topics in young adult literature is unreliable. Also, she states that authors don't show these supposedly dark topics to show teens how to do bad things.
Maureen Johnson uses many craft moves in her article. For example, her opinion about darkness being in books or not is very casual. She has a very friendly tone when she writes, as if she's actually talking to a person in front of her. Another instance is how she puts an image in the reader's brain that makes them side with her, such as the "I don't like Italian food, so it should not exist" image that she uses to show how ridiculous Megan Cox Gurdon sounds. Finally, she uses the opinion of twitter followers to support her claim by showing that many people have been influenced in a great way by young adult literature.
I agree with the author's claim. I believe that young adult literature is the perfect way to comfort and help a teenager who needs answers about hard topics in their lives. Being a teenager myself, I can say that some of the terrible things that happen in my life connect with many of the books I read. Although the topics in books may be depressingly dark, they help others understand the darkness in their own lives. Just as the author wrote, "maybe you don't like it. That's fine. But that may be a book that changes or even saves someone's life." Saving a reader's life is way more important than the amount of terrible topics there are.
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