“The Fat Girls Guide to Life” and “The Big, Fat American Kid”

The article “The Fat Girls Guide to Life” is a piece that voices an opinion on the body image of girls. The author considers her self as a “fat girl” which is the idea which is discussed in this article. She brings much of her own personal experience which provides a good basis for her point. If she had not lived what she is speaking about it would be much more difficult to take her comments as legitimate. The ethos of this piece means that since she has this experience so she is an expert on this subject. Her target audience could be girls that are overweight or anyone that has made fun of someone for being overweight. The audience could be overweight girls because it talks how you should accept who you are and not worry as much about what other people think. The audience could be those that have ever insulted a girl because of her weight. The author goes on in the selection to tell a story about how she was made fun of because of her weight. She talks about how it blew her away how rude and insensitive people can be and this could be used to try and change someone that is reading the paper.
The other piece “The Big, Fat American Kid Crisis… And 10 Things We Should Do About It” is a piece about how American children are getting fatter. The first part of the piece describes the problem and gives some statistics to provide evidence for this. After describing the problem the author list and describes 10 ways that America could go about fixing the problem. The 10 things that are listed are things that seem not very difficult but could go a long way in decreasing the amount of children that become fat or obese. The way these 10 things are just listed in the paper is very straightforward and to the point. She presents the name of each idea then goes on to describe the problem and a way to fix it. She does a great job at making each and every point seem very easy to do even though some of the points would be very difficult to accomplish. She provides reasons why to do this and why it should be done. These points seem doable because she presents them as easy steps to better living. She makes each of these steps seem easy despite the fact that several of these cannot be done easily at all or will not be done because of other reasons which of course the author conveniently leaves out. Overall though she does an excellent job at providing ways that Americas children can become healthier and lose those extra pounds.