David Petrie - Distracted Driving free essay sample

His standpoint is extremely clear; he argues for greater publication and law involvement for enforcing â€Å"pull over and stop† in the occasion of child distraction. Petrie supports his standpoint with personal experiences and statistical evidence. He began by describing the different kinds of distractions that experts at the U. S. Department of Transportation say there are: visual, manual, and cognitive distractions. He then tells the reader that these experts believe texting to be the most dangerously distracting action since it involves all three types of detrimental distractions. Once laying out the well known side of the arguments, he continues in the next paragraph to addresses his alternate or rather additional view of the argument. He quickly jumped to a personal anecdote as a means of bringing the subject close to home, for his target audience, and more relatable. His sentence structure becomes shorter and his diction relaxes greatly. At this point it became questionable as to whether Petrie was composing and arguing seriously or taking this subject into a too comfortable and informal direction. We will write a custom essay sample on David Petrie Distracted Driving or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Although his personal experience shows his knowledge of a stressful and distracting situation, he does not have direct evidence that this led to a hazardous outcome. Luckily Petrie backed up this story with a paralleled structure from the first paragraph stating how the three forms of distraction applied to his experiences in dealing with a young child in the backseat. Petrie furthers his desire to make the distracted driving campaign broader to include more than just texting while driving. He brings in statistical polls to support the need for a wider range of distractions to be publicized for more drivers to be made aware of. Statistics showed in favor of young children being one of the leading causes of driver-distraction crashes for people ages 20 to 29. The author asks a rhetorical question to spark thought over what should be done about the situation. Petrie presents the Department of Transportations way of fixing distracted driving; they say to Put it down! . Petrie suggests instead that it should be Pull over and stop. This solution encompasses quite a variety of situations with a simple message that can be followed under most circumstances. Under his specific circumstances, he put action to the previous message: â€Å"Pull over and stop† and he also found an alternative to match his personal problem: a pacifier clip, something to soothe his distracting baby. To conclude Petries argument, he poses a question to the audience inquiring their opinion on what the message should be to distracted drivers. It is a very valid point that Petrie argues. Child distraction has been a problem since the invention of any transportation vehicle. The new enemy of the road; texting has become capitalized on, but to the point of causing other distractions to fall behind in a shadow. He has successfully brought light to a lesser publicized distraction in a comfortable, but statically supported argument. Petrie emphasized the need to recognize more than one contributing factor to distracted driving. His fight was to recognize children in the backseat as a major contributor.