SWA # 9

An excerpt from a book entitled “The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life,” by Wendy Shanker, establishes a strong ethos towards how Americans view body image, especially larger bodies. As an overweight individual, Shanker describes how she struggled with body acceptance not only because of negative views from other people and society, but because of the negative outlook she imposed upon herself. Her evidence is mostly personal anecdotes or experiences which allows her ethos in this excerpt to be powerful and effective by applying to most situations of people’s denial of themselves. Whether it is body image or stereotypes, her first-hand experience with self-acceptance or lack thereof, is a model for everyone unhappy with their bodies or their lives. Since the topic of self-acceptance is so universal, the audience is almost endless, for it is rare to find a person content with every aspect of their lives.

In an article by Eleanor Randolph called “The Big, Fat American Kid Crisis…And 10 Things We Should Do About It, “Randolph poses the claim that American kids are fat, and getting fatter, because of unhealthy food enterprise. She formulates a proposal detailing how to stop, or at least greatly decrease, this “Big Food” presence in everyday American children’s life. She is extremely effective by proposing small, and therefore possible, strides that ten aspects of society could implement to stop obesity in children. By encompassing almost every important aspect and cause of obesity including banning junk food in schools, ceasing unhealthy food advertisements targeted at children, labeling nutritious facts at restaurants, and increasing proper health education for both children and adults, her proposal would likely succeed.