Meghan Daum is a columnist of LA
Times, who published four books previous to joining and wrote many articles for
the New Yorker, Harper’s and Vogue, and contributed to the public radio
programs “Morning Edition,” “Marketplace” and “This American Life. She writes
on the Op-Ed sections of the columns. The two columns I chose from her are
“Curvy or No, Barbie is Still a Mean Girl” and “2015: The Most Hyperbolic Year Ever”. I would label her point of view as critical. In her columns, Daum
talks about a certain topic or trend, and dissects it about what other people
say about it and how she feels about that topic. In “Curvy Barbie”, she
says how the new Barbie’s are depicted as “fat” and “basic”. She also says how Barbie’s
new and old give off the vibe of “it sucks to be you”. In “2015”, it
gives off the same idea of being critical. She talks about how Trump is calling
people names during the debates and how Instagram feeds are all lies and photo-shopped
selfies.
One writing
craft technique Daum uses is she implements many parantheses to emphasize or
exaggerate a certain point that is being made. In “Curvy Barbie”, she
uses the parenthesis to exaggerate how even though Barbie is shown to have many
professions such as a doctor and lawyer, she still has the “basic girl” inside
of her. Daum exaggerates the Basic Doctor Barbie by saying, “(the surgical
scrubs doubled as a mini-dress)” and the Basic Astronaut Barbie as, “ but you
can still be sure that she had...a vanilla-scented candle in the crew cabin of
the space station (‘You guys, why can’t I light this?’)”. She does the same
thing in “2015” and displays a ton of sarcasm in the parenthesis of this
column. An example is, “‘[Adele is] the biggest pop music story of our time’
(thanks, Rolling Stone)”. She also explains the disrespect to cultural food in
Oberlin College and how the sushi was made wrong, “(Never mind that the idea of
being able to eat sushi in a college cafeteria is...well, never mind, again)”.
As you can see, the use of parentheses show how Daum incorporates sarcasm and
emphasis to a topic being discussed, so it gives her writing more of a unique
and likeable flair.
