6. Who Are the Long-Term Unemployed?

     United States has somewhat recovered from its economic recession, however, according to Matthew O'Brien, four million American citizens are long-term unemployed -- that is, "four million people who can't even get companies to look at their resumes anymore". It is a serious issue considering that those who are unemployed have had the same level of education, if not more, than those who are newly unemployed. These newly unemployed consist mostly of individuals that are 25 years or younger while the long-term unemployed tend to be older or/and have been laid off from their job. The crisis set years ago has affected people today. It has taken jobs more than it has given them.
     As an informative piece, this selection is effective. Firstly, O'Brien uses charts to compare long-term unemployed, with newly unemployed and discouraged people. This allows the reader to engage themselves in something else other than words. It also makes the results much easier to analyze (comparing the effect of education level, race, and age on employment). Second, the vocabulary is appropriate since for the formal article that it is. O'Brien is pretty direct as well using phrases such as "Let's go to the charts now", which allows us, the readers, to easily read through the information given to us. The sentence structure is varied. He uses questions, long sentences and short statements which gives fluidity to the text. Due to the subject of the selection and the diction, I believe the target audience is more mature and "business-minded" people. Overall, the tone of the selection is monotone since the main purpose of the article is to persuade, but towards the second to last paragraph O'Brien uses words such as "depressing"and "worst crisis in 80 years"sets a serious and criticizing tone. It also shows the author's perspective of things. He does not believe it is fair that people who have the same (if not better) education than others have to become long-term unemployed. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/who-are-the-long-term-unemployed/278964/