Linh Truong

Professor S. Stokes Dobyns

English 103
6 February 2017
Rhetorical Analysis of “ Gen Y is from Mercury”
In the article “ Gen Y is from Mercury”, Kit Yarrow and Jayne O’Donnell, choose to
believe that Gen Y is “unquestionably unique”, and it is “one of the most powerful and
influential generations ever”. The authors try to convince the audience that Gen Y is “diverse,
adaptive, and confident”. The most two important reasons are their parents and the digital world;
they use statistics, studies, along with trends to persuade their audience.
Kit and Jayne use statistics to prove the fact that adoring parents play a huge part of Gen
Y being confident and powerful. They state that “nearly half of Gen Y children divorced parents,
and one-third come from single-parent households, those parents still spent more focused time
with their Gen Y kids than any previous generations”. This depicts that it does not matter
whether parents are together or divorced, parents are still very responsible in spending quality
time with their children, and they are interested in getting to know more about their kids.
Another data that the authors use as their evidence and reason is that, “we found it most helpful
to view Gen Y parents on a normally distributed curve, with those clearly overinvolved, coddling
helicopters at one end; some relatively disengaged parents at the other hand, and most of the
group in the middle-registering more kid-centric than the last generation of parents, but not
‘coptering coddlers either”. This shows that parents pay more attention to their kids, which
improve children’s developement and contribute building their confidence and power.
Besides, another reason that the authors believe Gen Y is very unique because of
technology. Since kids is the most important thing to parents, technology is a tool that help
connect parents to children. As the authors state that “their intuitive ease with technology and
their ability to adapt to technological shifts is a genuine asset to any family”. This shows that
technology help kids and parent keep in touch and get closer to each other more. Not only that,
technology also help Gen Yers become speed, power, and self-reliance. The authors say that with
internet, it allows young people to multitasking, become more imformative, and connect to
people, etc. An example, “Kit noticed, during a recent guest lecture at UC Berkerly, that at least
hald of her students were typing. A quick cruise around the room revealed about half of those
typist were looking up her articles, an international student was checking a word definition, and
the rest were on Facebook”, is shown in the article. Technology lets them do things on their own;
therefore, Gen Yers get what they want when they want it.
The authors did a good job in providing reasons and evidence to support their claims. I do
agree with them that parents play a key role in children’s development, and technology is very
important in helping the millennials do many things such as doing their own research,
multitasking, stay in touch with friends, etc. It is good that they provide proofs such as statistics
and examples. However, I haven’t found these evidences are strong and convincing enough. It
will be better if they provide more data into the technology portion to make their claims stronger.