Example of Essay about Americans’ obsession with physical appearance.

Conforming to Stand Out: A Look at American Beauty

In nature, two factors largely determine survival of the species: access to resources and physical attraction (necessary for the ability to mate). Humans function under the same basic rules. In modern America, where almost everyone can acquire the basic resources to live, humans are striving harder than ever to be physically attractive. Although men are increasingly caught up in its grip, the pressure to be beautiful falls most intensely on women. The thin craze, the plastic surgery craze, and the body art craze represent some of the increasingly drastic lengths American women are being driven to in their quest for physical perfection.

Since Kate Moss’s wafer-thin frame took the modeling industry by storm, skinny has driven America’s aesthetics. Hollywood is a mirror for our desires, and our starlets are shrinking. Lindsay Lohan, once lauded for her curves, dropped to a disturbing weight, and her Alleged struggles with bulimia were detailed in Vanity Fair (Thomas 2D), although Lohan later claimed the story was misleading. Nicole Ritchie and Angelina Jolie, among others, have also publicly struggled with eating disorders. And the stars aren’t alone. According to the United States National Institutes of Mental Health, between 0.5 and 3.7 percent of American women will suffer from anorexia in their lifetimes, while another 1.1 to 4.2 percent will be bulimic and

2 to 5 percent will binge. These numbers exclude the disordered eaters who do not meet all the

criteria necessary for diagnosis or do not accurately self-report. In a population of 300 million, these statistics represent millions of women struggling with food disorders. Men are not immune either, accounting for 5 to 15 percent of bulimia and anorexia diagnoses and 35 percent of binge-eating cases. The skinny obsession is spiraling out of control as more people risk death to be thin through diet pills and gastric bypass surgery.

But for every Kate Moss idolizer, there’s a would-be Pamela Anderson. This ideal, fed by

porn and Hollywood, is plastic perfection: instead of anorexically denying their curves, many women choose to enhance their features through surgery. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) reports that in 2006, there were nearly 11 million cosmetic surgeries in the

United States and an additional 5.2 million reconstructive plastic surgeries (“11 Million”). While it must be remembered that the rule is not one surgery per person, so that the number of patients is lower than these figures, the scope of this practice is staggering nonetheless. Further evidence is provided by the surgically enhanced lips, stomachs, buttocks, and breasts that cover the pages of men’s magazines all over the country. Strippers, porn stars like Jenna Jameson, and Playboy models like Anderson and the recently deceased Anna Nicole Smith flaunt enormous fake breasts. Clearly there is a disconnect between the sexless anorexic standard that so many women strive for and the bottle blonde bombshell that so many men favor. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that plastic surgery is a response to the fear of aging. And in this way as well, men too are increasingly vulnerable to the superficial, with the ASPS reporting that they accounted for 12 percent of plastic surgeries in 2005 (“2005”).

Body art, in the form of piercing and tattoos, also illustrates (literally) Americans’ obsession with physical appearance. The pierced and tattooed once jarred on public sensibilities, but now these body modifications have gone mainstream. Even “alternative” piercings are now accepted: Amy Winehouse, a heavily tattooed popular musician, has added to the popularity of the “Monroe” piercing, located above the lip where Marilyn Monroe had a mole. Nearly half the members of “Generation Next” have had a tattoo, piercing or “untraditional color” of hair (Pew Research Center 21). Once largely limited to sailors, criminals, and punk rockers--and to men-- body art has become big business, drawing in more women as it spreads.

Maybe Americans have gone too far in basing their self-worth on physical appearance. Every visible part of the human body has been marketed as a fixable flaw or an opportunity for more adornment. Of course, Americans have always cared about their looks and made great efforts to improve them, but once most people kept the issue in perspective. Today, appearance rules. And men increasingly are joining women in obedience to its commands. Both sexes, though, will find that basing self-esteem on physical appearance, a fleeting commodity at best, is a recipe for misery.

Works Cited

American Society of Plastic Surgeons. “2005 Gender Quick Facts.” Plastic Surgery.org. ASPS,

22 Mar. 2007. Web. 10 Dec. 2007.

---. “11 Million Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Procedures in 2006--Up 7%.” Plastic Surgery.org.

ASPS, 2006. Web. 10 Dec. 2007.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. How Young People View Their Lives, Futures,

and Politics: A Portrait of “Generation Next.” Washington: Pew, 2007. Pew Research Center

for the People & the Press. Web. 11 Nov. 2007.

Thomas, Karen. “Year of Lows for Lohan: Actress Tells ‘Vanity Fair’ of Eating Disorders, Drug

Use.” USA Today 5 Jan. 2006: 2D. Print.

United States. National Institutes of Mental Health. The Numbers Count: Mental Disorders in

America. NIMH, 7 Dec. 2007. Web. 10 Dec. 2007

 

Why Strive to Improve Your Writing Skills?

Writing Skills Help You Succeed in College and in Your Career

College courses such as psychology, biology, and political science demand that you read articles, essays, reports, and textbooks and then react to and write about what you have read. In many courses, you demonstrate what you have learned by writing exams, reports, and papers.

Writing is important on the job, as well. In most jobs, workers need to communicate effectively with supervisors, coworkers, patients, clients, and customers. You can expect to write plenty of letters, email messages, memos, and reports. The 2000–2001 study performed by the Collegiate Employment Research Institute found that employers consistently want the “total package” in recent college graduates. Employers want job candidates who have not only the technical knowledge to work but also strong oral and written communication skills. Because your writing course offers both immediate and long-range benefits, it is one of the most important college courses you will ever take. You will learn how to express your ideas clearly, structure convincing arguments, prepare research papers, and write essay exams. Your writing course will also help you improve your reading and thinking skills. As you read, respond to, and write about the readings, you will learn how to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate ideas.

Writing Helps You Learn and Remember Things

Taking notes, outlining, summarizing, or annotating focuses your attention on the course material and gets you thinking about the subject matter as you connect and define ideas. In addition, writing facilitates learning by engaging two senses at once. Whereas you take in information visually by reading or aurally by listening, writing engages your sense of touch as you put your pen to paper or your fingers on a keyboard. In general, the more senses you use in a learning task, the more easily learning occurs and the more you remember about the task later on. You can often remember something more easily if you write it down.

Writing Helps You Think More Clearly

Writing forces you to think through a task. Getting your ideas down on paper or on a computer screen helps you evaluate them. Writing, then, is a means of sorting ideas, exploring relationships, weighing alternatives, and clarifying values.

Writing Helps You Solve Problems

When you solve problems, you identify possible actions that may change undesirable situations (your car won’t start) to desirable ones (your car starts). Writing makes problem solving easier by helping you define the problem. By describing the problem in writing, you can often see new aspects of it.

One student, for example, had a father-in-law who seemed hostile and uncooperative.

The student described her problem in a letter to a friend: “He looks at me as if I’m going to take his son to the end of the earth and never bring him back.” When she reread this statement, the student realized that her father-in-law might resent her because he was afraid of losing contact with his son. She began to think of ways to reassure her father-in-law and strengthen their relationship. Writing about the problem helped the student define it and discover ways to solve it. Similarly, writing can help you think through confusing situations and make difficult decisions.

WHY IS CRITICAL THINKING IMPORTANT IN WRITING?

Why is critical thinking important? It is important because how we ask a question plays a very important role in the answers at which we arrive.

Think of it this way:

Imagine a plant on a hillside. There is a lot of knowledge that could be produced by studying this plant, and by asking different questions.

We could examine its cellular structure. We could determine its place in the taxonomy of other plants. We could discover its potential medicinal value. We could track the history of its migration. We could determine its life cycle. We could look up its Latin name. We could conduct research to see if it plays a role in any ancient myths. We could determine its role within the local ecology, etc. For each way in which we ask a different question of that plant, we would get a different answer.

Even if we put all of those questions and answers together, we still wouldn’t know everything about that plant. That is because the plant is what is called existent . In the end, it does not matter how many ways we measure it, or how many other kinds of things to which it is compared: the plant simply is what it is. It might be a difficult notion to wrap one’s head around, but being and knowledge are simply not the same things.

That does not mean that truth is relative, or that we can’t say something important,

useful, and accurate about the plant. We can produce knowledge about it; we can be

right, or wrong, in the knowledge that we produce. Rather, it is that we have different structures for determining what is true. Producing knowledge is often systematic. We compare things according to criteria that are already established. We process an object that we find, in the world (e.g.: Milkweed), through a system that is designed to produce answers (e.g.: Botany-the study of

plants), and get a variation of the same answer that we receive when we run a different

object (e.g.: Chrysanthemum) through that system. In doing so, we generate categories

and taxonomies, and we understand things better.

We can ask the same question of different objects, or we can ask different questions

of the same object. In other words, the questions that we ask, and how we ask them, and why we ask them, play an important part in determining the answers we receive. We like to organize the world, and that requires repeating the same questions, in the same way, of

similar objects.

Critical thinking is about paying attention to the way that we think when we ask these questions and get our answers, including what we’re taking for granted—such as the notion that Latin and plants are related, or how we would define a myth. Most of all, it is a way to understand how our discursive practices affect our view of the significance of that knowledge. All skilled academic thinkers and writers pay close attention to critical thinking. People are not quality thinkers just because they find answers; they are quality thinkers because they remain mindful of the way in which they are asking questions.

That’s why the history of ideas is not just a history of the steadily growing accumulation

of answers to which we have arrived. It is also a history of the ever-changing ways that our questions have limited, or expanded, the range of the answers that it is possible for us to receive. The tricky thing about critical thinking is accepting that it is not about answers, but

rather the way that we get to them. Critical thinking is an ongoing, self-corrective habit-of-mind that helps academic writers to understand how thinking is structured, the elements that influence the way that we think, how those influences can bias our thinking, how to guard against those biases, and the strengths and limitations of the language we use to express those thoughts.

In relationship to writing, critical thinkers raise vital questions, formulate them in language that is precise and clear, identify any assumptions made in asking the question, adjust when encountering valid points that contradict expectations, and remain rigorously honest. Writers who engage in critical writing do that, on paper, for a reader. That’s what academic writing is supposed to do.