Non-fiction book introduction #3-Let's Pretend This Never Happened

I chose to read the book "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson. As I was scrolling through Goodreads' list of nonfiction best sellers, I decided that I wanted to read a funnier, lighter book, rather than a serious, sad one. This jumped out at me, and I am excited to see what this book is all about.

TOW #16-Girl In The Woods

The book “Girl In The Woods” was written by Aspen Matis. Aspen tells a true story about her life in college. On her second night in college she was raped, and afterwards she felt extremely alone and hurt. She didn’t know how to cope with such a terrible thing happening to her, so she fled to the Mexican border and started a 2,650 mile long trek across the United States all the way up to Canada. As imagined, this is an incredibly challenging task, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Throughout this book, she explains all the troubles she encountered, but most of all how the trek transformed her. With the use of the transformations that she encountered, she successfully told an amazing story about how she coped with feeling scared, lonely, and depressed.

Aspen learned a lot through her journey. She originally began the experience because she felt lonely and weak due to the rape, and her parent’s disappointing reaction when she told them what had happened. She used lots of negative diction in the beginning of the book, which really showed how much was struggling. However, once she started her trek, she began using more positive and uplifting diction, showing how much stronger she felt once she was forced to come to terms with her situation. She additionally compared and contrasted her feelings before the trek, with her feelings after the trek. In the beginning, she was depressed, lonely, and scared; but after, she felt strong. With the use of shifting diction, and juxtaposition, she successfully showed how much the journey helped her confidence.

 

TOW #15-From 'Cow' to Cover Girl

In the article “From 'cow' to cover girl, model Winnie Harlow is changing beauty standards,” published on January 8^th of 2016, the author Zahra Jamshed uses a question and answer format to show how this model has changed the fashion community. The author of this article, Zahra Jamshed, works for CNN and publishes for CNN style.  In this particular article she focuses on a model named Winnie Harlow who overcame adversity and became an incredibly successful woman. Winnie Harlow was diagnosed with a skin condition when she was younger in which she had patches of her skin that was colorless. Since she was African American, and with her condition she had patches of light skin, people used to taunt and tease her when she was younger, being called names such as “cow” and “zebra.” Now, Harlow has over a million followers on Instagram and has a very successful career as a model, and is now changing the norms.

In the article, the author successfully uses a question and answer format to easily tell the stories of how this particular model has come so far. The questions include such like: How did you overcome being bullied as a child? Does prejudice and discrimination still exist within fashion? How important is social media in changing and developing concepts of beauty? Your look has become a fashion statement in and of itself. What do you think of the backlash against some of the people trying to imitate your condition? By incorporating these very direct statements followed by exactly what Harlow says, it makes it very easy for the audience to pick apart the information and put a story together. These questions also show how important Harlow believes self-confidence is, and how beauty comes in many different forms and that we should not judge based off of looks. Especially because someday something you believed was ‘ugly,’ may now be incredibly trendy and beautiful. 

TOW #14-Is Instagram Changing the World?

There was recently an article posted about how the commonly known app called Instagram has changed society. CNN is known for posting articles that show how social media effects society in positive and negative ways, so this specific article was nothing out of the ordinary. The article is called “Five Years On: Untangling Instagram’s Growing Web of Influence” and was written by Tom Jenkins. The author is a freelance journalist who focuses primarily on food, music, fashion, art and design, all topics that were mentioned in the article about Instagram. By focusing on different parts of the Instagram world, and providing pictures to back up his claims, he can easily and successfully explain the many ways that Instagram is changing the world.

Jenkins splits the article up into sections in which he easily separates how Instagram has changed the world. The sections are fashion, art, travel, food, fame and activism. Each section comes equipped with a screenshot of a post that supports the claim he makes in the topic. For example, in the travel section he speaks about how one man “quit his job as an IT Consultant for IBM and is now one of the most popular photographers on Instagram.” He inserting one of his photos that he posted on Instagram of a lake that he went kayaking in which shows how beautiful our world really is. He also shows another side of how Instagram has changed traveling by stating that “a platform like Instagram is giving people a glimpse into other worlds, cultures, and topics.” Not only can people enjoy these beautiful places through a phone screen, but since they have the ability to find the destination they can also go and travel there to see the places themselves. Overall, Jenkins successfully showed the positive ways that Instagram has changed the world by focusing on multiple areas and providing screenshots to back up his claim.