Marriage and Child Obesity
Mona Chalabi’s blog post entitled “Dear Mona, Does Living Together Before Marriage Increase the Risk of Divorce?” answers this question sent into her by a man named Dave. In the beginning of the post she uses a conversational approach. She writes as if she is talking to Dave and says things such as, “The short answer to your question is.” Towards the end however, this conversational approach seems to taper off and the tone becomes more informative yet snarky.
The post interacts with other sites and other people by using information from them in the post itself. Mona uses statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a fact from a 2010 Pew Research Center survey, and statements from Arielle Kuperberg (an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Sharon Sassler (a professor at Cornell University). These interactions help Mona to add credibility to her post.
I think the topic in general is interesting enough to keep the reader’s attention. Some other ways Mona attempts to keep the audience’s attention is by including a graph on probability that a marriage will remain in tact, and a list of 15 characteristics that correlate with the chances of a first marriage succeeding. She also starts off some of her topics in the post with a question, which leaves the reader longing to know the answer.
The post both begins and ends with the thought that maybe cohabiting opens up the field to bigger issues that might cause divorce.
The second blog post I read was “Child Obesity – Is It Out of Control?” by Gary Kidd. Gary seems like a very passionate person. His post is informative and persuasive. He provides information about child obesity and talks about what needs to be done in order to gain control over it. The tone is in no way funny or light-hearted.
There is no interaction with other sites or people in this post. This hurts Gary’s credibility as an author. All throughout the post there are facts and an abundance of statistics. Although Gary makes it seem like he knows what he’s talking about, I still question where he got his information.
The main way the post keeps the reader’s attention is through the length of paragraphs. The paragraph length has some variation but many are kept fairly short. The short paragraphs help the flow from one paragraph to the next run smoothly. In one instance he uses a question to start off his paragraph which helps keep the reader’s attention.
The post starts by stating statistics about the recent rise in childhood obesity rates in the United States and what those rates are today. The purpose of the statistics are to shock the readers into realizing how much of a problem this issue really is. By the end of the post, Gary assumes that he has persuaded the readers to agree with him. He states outright that childhood obesity is an epidemic and something needs to be done about it before it is too late.
Image from: http://sowhatfaith.com/2014/03/20/divorce-cohabitation/
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The post from “Dear Mona, Does Living Together before Marriage Increase the Rate of Divorce?” is very interesting. To me, the setup of the post (as you mentioned) as a conversation makes it casual and easy to follow. The tone isn’t forced, but merely an attempt to answer the question with the appropriate information. The author, Mona Chalabi, makes the post pleasing to the eye with the graph, bullet points, and plethora of external links. Given Chalabi’s title as lead writer for the Data Lab, there is no doubt that she is qualified to answer these posts and the numerous sources she provides back that up. The beginning is a casual response to the question , and the end is like a the closing of a letter, “Hope this helps, Mona”.
I agree, I did like the casual-ness in Mona’s response to Dave’s question and the fact that it was formatted in a letter. Her statistics come from the CDC so her response is very credible. The way Mona lays out the data and different research is easy to follow and simple to read. I did not think that Mona’s response had a strong bias, but I thought she ended cleverly by saying that it might not be the cohabiting that leads to the ink on the divorce papers.
I agree with what you said about Gary Kidd’s lack of credibility in “Childhood Obesity- Is It Out Of Control?”. He states a new statistic almost every other sentence but does not offer any indication of where he might have gotten his information. This makes it very hard to trust whether he actually knows what he is talking about. If he had sources, his post would have been much more effective.