Short Writing Assignment #9

In Wendy Shanker’s excerpt from The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, she constructs her ethos by talking about the obesity problem as a woman who is overweight. Although she is a grown woman, she actually refers to herself as a girl because she believes that using the word girl alludes to “girl power”, thus empowering her to be a ‘real’ human being, rather than being put down for her weight. Throughout her story, she talks about how she is fat, but that she should not be thought of as any less than a person. By telling this story as an overweight person, she works to give confidence to others who have tried dieting but cannot shed any weight. She also tells that just because she is overweight does not mean that she is unhealthy; she goes to the doctor for regular check-ups.
Her target audience is the overweight population of America; overweight girls, to be exact. Her article is clearly from a fat person’s perspective (and I use the word fat because she states that fat is just a word—the meaning of it depends on how a person perceives it), because emphasizes that she is overweight. The targeted audience is therefore able to relate to her, because they have suffered the same verbal abuse.
Eleanor Randolph, the author of “The Big Fat American Kid Crisis…and 10 things We Should Do about It”, presents the problem of obesity in America by providing statistics about the obesity rates and information from the National Institute of Health, as well as effects of adult obesity that are being seen in children. She is effective in making her proposals seem feasible because she proposes an idea to keep young people from eating junk food by naming ideas that make it harder for the children to get this food. After proposing that fattening foods should be taxed, I thought that many people would still buy the junk food, regardless of the price, but she said that the extra money would go towards after-school exercise programs and medical expenses for diabetes; she was able to justify how her proposal would work.