Women today are far too aware of their appearance. The questions,Does this make me look fat?? orDo my boobs look small?? are used by women of all shapes and sizes. This great concern of appearance is an accepted part of growing up as a female in American society. Sadly, some women are consumed by this desire to be perfect. Many women spend their entire lives contemplating their physical imperfections. Even if it is only a weekly thought, the thought still remains. In Sallie Tisdale's essay, Mean Cuisine, she tells of her lifelong struggles with the need to diet while relating to women of all shapes and sizes. Nora Ephron's essay, A Few Words about Breasts, takes a more specific look at how she perceives her physical flaws. While both Tisdale and Ephron discuss unconquerable body issues, they approach them with contrasting directions and tones.
Tisdale uses a stark yet informative tone that helps the reader sympathize with her. Ephron, however, uses a self-interested tone that pushes the reader away from identifying with her. Tisdale opens her essay with a statistic about dieters. She continues by enforcing this statistic on the reader by asking a rhetorical question about personal meal choices. This sets the tone for her essay. By using a fact at the beginning of the essay, she lets the reader know exactly what she will be addressing. By using a rhetorical question, she lets the reader know that this essay will be personal. Tisdale uses her own dieting experiences and mentions other forms of dieting to help show how powerless she is to the topic. She makes it seem like dieting controls her life rather than her controlling her diet. She also uses a tone that may sound like a warning to potential victims of dieting. She writes only of her bad dieting experience and never addresses the positive aspects. In opening up a very personal but very identifiable subject with such a welcoming tone, Tisdale draws the reader in and makes them understand how she has felt and continues to feel.
