SWA #9

6. The effect of the ethos presented by Wendy Shanker is very convincing. In the exert from her book The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, Shanker uses her own life experiences to express her opinions on body image and the word “fat”. By doing this she comes across as being a very believable source because people tend to believe something if it can relate to a person’s life. Her target audience for her book is a woman who feels that she is fat, whether it is true or not. In her book she points out that even women that are a size 2 can feel fat. This book reaches the targeted audience because any woman that has ever felt that way can relate to the experiences that Shanker has experienced and mentioned in her book. Most women feel insecure about themselves, and this book may help them to learn how to love themselves and their bodies, regardless of how they look.

7. In Eleanor Randolph’s article titled “The Big Fat American Kid Crisis…and 10 Things We Should Do about It”, she presents her argument by stating what is causing kids to get fat and 10 things America can do to help stop and prevent it. She blames most of the cause on “Big Food”, or the food companies that target children to advertise their fattening foods. Then Randolph proceeds to give the ten ways to improve kids’ nutrition and health, and most of the reasons have to deal with how to stop “Big Food” from reaching kids. However, she isn’t very effective in making all of her proposals seem feasible. Some of her proposals, such as the subsidies and food labeling, would be very hard to accomplish if it could be done at all. Getting the government to change something is hard, especially something such as changing the values of food stamps depending on what it is used to purchase. By doing so the government would have to establish a very strict guide as to what a healthy choice is and what junk food is. There are also foods that fall in between that category. This poses a large complication to creating these subsidies, and this example is only one of Rudolph’s proposals.