Extra SWA

Shanker

In an excerpt from her book, The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, Wendy Shanker presents her philosophies on living in our society as an overweight woman. She clearly defines her ethos as a “woman on a mission”. This attitude is not one that has a feeling of duty or honor; rather it is more of a Rambo-esque mentality. This ethos almost lends an air of emotionally blocked logic to the piece; the author plays strongly on personal opinion. The author also explicitly states that she is not educated in any field of medicine, just a woman with “a chip on my shoulder”. This in and of itself kills any credibility the article might have had by directly displaying ignorance towards any intellectual findings on the subject of obesity. Though this attitude is most likely appealing to people who share her sentiments, it discourages others from understanding her argument. This being said, her target audience is obviously other obese woman who are tired of being looked down upon for their physical stature. The author writes to the members of this group to give them a support platform; a strong voice in their favor to stand behind. Other than her fellow overweight Americans, the article also aims itself at those of us who do look down upon obese members of society; there are multiple references and attacks towards this group. Shanker uses these attacks in an attempt to explain why it’s okay to be fat, and wrong to criticize people who are obese.


Randolph
Randolph presents her argument by first outlining the issue she is concerned with: overweight children. She presents different statistical data to support the claim that child obesity is a severe crisis in the United States. Randolph illustrates how businesses have addressed this growing (no pun intended) trend in our society. The clothing industry has begun to adopt politically correct phrases to apply to overweight kids; such as “plus-sized”. She then presents how this trend will affect our nation, from life span to health care costs. The real focus of Randolph’s article is given in ten solutions she feels will help solve this issue. For the most part Randolph does a decent job of explaining each of her reasons and how to begin implementing change. For instance, her first reason “Stop bombarding children with junk food ads” clearly identifies a problem and its effect. She then gives a clear and probable solution to this aspect; however, too many of her explanations of the ten reasons focus on the stalemate of the issue. In “Ban the junk food in schools”, she acknowledges that junk food has been almost completely removed from elementary and middle schools; but not high schools. Rather than giving an additional or more productive solution, she simply ends the section on this note. With this taken into account, Randolph’s article could have been much more effective if more complete solutions were given.