Sinara Isoyan
E&C 141-A Persuasive Writing
Instructor: Dr. Ken Monteith
Date: April 3, 2017
Opinion Editorial
Killing Careers and Disheartening Writers
Dear Publishers Weekly,
With the rapid rise of technology and the incredibly invasive content found on the
internet, people can now illegally download books on select websites for free. Can you
comprehend the exceptionally adverse impact this advancement can have on writers? Writers
spend a few years and more than a few sleepless nights to pen down a story, a novel, which then
would have to be edited and approved by a publishing company in order to be published and sold
to the public. That is how writers earn their money to support themselves and their families, if
they own one. Or two, but that shouldn’t matter. What matters is that the internet has now made
it entirely accessible and quite easy to rob writers of their income, to rob them of their future.
And this is undoubtedly a catastrophic issue that needs to be dealt with as soon as possible,
primarily by blocking websites that illegally upload books and holding people accountable for
the content they upload.
Stories have been there for a long time and they are a major component of our everyday
lives; parents narrate stories to their kids before bedtime, colleagues share their adventurous
stories over lunch and kids make up fantasy stories to scare each other when the night
approaches. Of course not everyone who is capable of telling a story decides on a career as a
writer, however some do. With the revolutionary introduction of printing, authors were able to
write their books while publishers produced the books as hard copies which people could buy
1