Response to Emily Raboteau’s “Playgrounds I Have Known”

This is my response to the short essay “Playgrounds I Have Known” by American writer, Emily Raboteau.

In the short essay “Playgrounds I Have Known”, Emily Raboteau discusses her take on different public and private spaces in New York through different perspectives that she encounters throughout her life, including dogs, bicyclists, parents – both middle and upper class, children etcetera. Notably, she touches on the idea of how public places have different meanings and can invoke different emotions depending at the stage of life one is at.

Integrating sources by relating them to her personal experience, she frequently transitions between her own opinion and experiences with more concrete and factual statements. For example, she states, “The current baby boom among Manhattan’s wealthy class is unique among U.S. cities, with the number of children below age five having grown over 30 percent since the turn of the millennium,”¹ and adds how “My son and daughter are part of this demographic upswing.”² As she does not just use factual information or personal experiences on their own, it not only allows the audience to better relate to what she’s saying, but it also makes it more legitimate and credible.

Another method she employs to integrate sources is putting them into context, which can be seen when she provides us with observations about the way parents were acting in a tour of a preschool and proceeds to note the “booming test-prep market to get into those kindergartens, which are 70 percent white and Asian.”³ This gives her opinion and experiences more reliability as an argument and makes the information easier to comprehend as well.

In terms of her style, Raboteau generally prefers to show rather than tell. This is most evident in the description of the playgrounds, where she uses vivid descriptions such as “empty dime bags”⁴ and “peeling rainbow mural”⁵ to subtly imply at the shabbiness of the playground – rather than explicitly stating it. She also likes to use multiple short sentences in a row, writing that “My husband chases our son on his scooter. It can feel like a second childhood. But just as often it’s tedious as hell.”⁶ This has the effect of making the sentences more impactful, as it forces the reader to pause frequently while reading it. Similarly, it contains a lot of implicit meaning as well, which in this case is much more effective than being overly descriptive.

Emily, Raboteau. “Playgrounds I Have Known.” In Nonstop Metropolis, 174-78. University of California Press, 2016.