Video Games and Their Effects on Children

     I want to address the concerned parents of children who play video games. If you are a parent, then you are worried about the effects of video games on your child. Some people say that video games can lead towards aggressive feelings in children, and that it can make children behave violently. But those people ignore the fact that video games do have positive effects on children instead of only having negative effects.

     Video games do have positive effects to the mind by improving cognitive skills. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), video games strengthen one's reasoning, memory, problem-solving skills and creativity (APA 2013). Visual novels that involve solving mysteries, such as the Ace Attorney series, can help improve one's reasoning. Strategy RPGs like the Fire Emblem series can help develop problem-solving skills. Generally, video games have a variety of characters, plot and game-play that can spark creativity in children. Through my personal experience, playing through certain visual novels like the Ace Attorney series has helped me to try and think outside the box by making me figure out how the culprit committed their crime. As an avid player of video games, I believe that you should at least give video games a chance instead of discrediting them right away. Video games can help instead of just hurt!

"Video Games Play May Provide Learning, Health, Social Benefits, Review Finds." American
     Psychological Association, 25 November 2013,

     http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2013/11/video-games.aspx 

     In the aforementioned paragraphs, I have utilized some of William Zinsser's strategies. One piece of advice he mentions is to take out the little qualifiers, such as "a little" and "kind of." In the first paragraph I mentioned how parents are worried about the effects of video games. I could have said 'you may be worried about the potential effects of video games.' This doesn't have that large of an impact on the audience due to being uncertain with my words. Another piece of advice he suggests is to use mood changers. Zinsser says that "but" is an effective word when used at the start of a sentence. I used the word "but" as the first word of my sentence in the first paragraph in order to introduce the counterargument to the previous sentence. One final strategy he mentions is to save the use of exclamation points to achieve a certain effect. I used the exclamation point in my final sentence in order to leave a lasting impression of the idea that video games can have both positive and negative effects instead of just having negative effects. These were the strategies I used in my writing.