English coursework essay and commentary- Curvy Models. Over the years body-image issues are plaguing girls across the country. and commentary

by nadinesaleem (student)

EVERY SHAPE, EVERY SIZE, MATTERS!

Look in the mirror. What do you see?

Many teenage girls might shock you with their answers. Describing themselves as ‘ugly’ and ‘fat’. Over the years body-image issues are plaguing girls across the country. As a result of this majority have taken up unhealthy weight-controlling behaviour. This is done by skipping meals, taking laxatives and excessive smoking. Did you know that 9 in 10 females are conscious and currently unhappy about their body image? More than half of these are young girls. There are over 1.3 million eating disorders in the UK alone. Happy, healthy and heroic is the feeling once you overcome anorexia. It’s about time we waved goodbye to the itty bitty twiggy runway models and say hello to the healthy curves of the new faces in Britain’s model industry. Majority of the runway models meet the body mass index criteria for anorexia. However over the past few years the trend of stick-thin models has started to become unappetising.

“When I was younger I had a poor self-image, very low self-esteem, and yearned for a better body. I destroyed EVERY single mirror in the house as I couldn’t bear the sight of my body. I used to sit and count my ribs. I didn’t choose to be that way, it just happened. A few years later by the age of 19, I was 16 stone. From suffering Anorexia to becoming one of the biggest teens in Britain, it was a shock. Then I decided to set myself a target, lose weight and appreciate what I have. I’m glad I’ve moved on and I wouldn’t want anyone else to go through what I did. Now at the age of 22, I weigh 11 stone now, which is the perfect weight for me. I am overwhelmed with my body and have learnt to appreciate what I have been blessed with. I hope to soon conquer the rest of Britain and help more teenage girls on the road to freedom. I don’t like to think of myself as being ‘small’ size, I’m average and I couldn’t be happier.” -Katya Zharkova, plus size model.

However Kate Moss has been criticised by campaigners after revealing she lives by a slogan which encourages people with anorexia not to eat. "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” – Kate Moss. Eating disorder charity Beat described the comments as "dangerous" and "very unhelpful" for sufferers. Kate shouldn’t have said so, however a spokeswoman for Moss's model agency claimed: "This was part of a longer answer Kate ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

Women come in all shapes and sizes, and all of us have got the right to present ourselves beautifully in gorgeous clothes. Whether you’re overweight or tall, skinny or small, we are all beautiful. Everyone is different, everyone is beautiful and everyone is normal. Remember that.

Commentary

I chose to produce an interpretation of women of different shapes and sizes. I have done this in a magazine/article form. The audience of this piece was aimed at young girls, teenagers and women. It is more common for them to have a stronger opinion on the matter. Throughout the article I have written in both active and passive voice, it varies the focus of each sentence and questions the reader. I have written in second and third person by using ‘you’ and ‘she’ which are both singular. This technique it allows the reader to understand different perspectives and direct the reader.

The pronoun ‘you’ links in with trying to involve the reader, by using the rhetorical question ‘What do you see’ it almost gets the reader interested in reading the article right from the beginning, it asks for their opinion. The rule of three is used a number of times in this piece, ‘itty, bitty, twiggy’ is mainly used for emphasis on the fact that stick-thin models are a shadow of the past. There nouns used in this piece are both concrete and abstract. Concrete nouns can be experienced through the five senses, but abstract nouns cannot be accessed by the senses and tend to be intangible ideas that form a part of our life (love, hatred). By using attributive adjectives such as ‘gorgeous’ it gives the reader some additional information about the clothes before reading on.

Superlative adjectives are used to compare nouns, ‘biggest’ tells the readers that Katya wasn’t big or bigger but she was the biggest. I decided to use contrasting celebrities point of view to indulge the reader in celebrities opinions. The verb ‘used’ indicates the tense of what Katya used to do; in this case she used to “sit and count my ribs”. This quote puts the reader in Katya’s point of view. The reader would imagine what it would be like to sit and count their ribs, but you can only sit and count your ribs if you are anorexic. The average healthy person has enough fat on their body to form a stomach. Katya was anorexic which meant she could feel her insides. I chose not to directly tell the reader that Katya was anorexic until the next few sentences, to make the reader wonder what was wrong. ‘More’ is an indefinite determiner used to put out to the reader a sense of discomfort most teenagers feel when it comes to body image and almost officialises the context. By using subordinate simple and compound clauses that are connected by conjunctions and followed on by a subject and verb. In this case ‘So’ makes the reader think about the fact that there are so many different eating disorder cases around the world.

Overall, I think this piece is interesting because it is an article that questions the reader’s thoughts about what is right and wrong about being under and over weight. In my opinion it manages to interpret different views on the matter of being different shapes and sizes and at the end uses the quote “Everyone is different, everyone is beautiful and everyone is normal. Remember that.” This quote uses repetition which is an excellent feature for slogans, the use of repetition means the slogan will be catchy to the reader and will stay in the readers mind and that is what I wanted to achieve when I wrote the article.

ARTICLE – 487 WORDS

COMMENTARY – 570 WORDS