How Does Mem Fox Appeal To The Audience

Looking from an external perspective, the vast majority of Mem Fox’s projects center around bettering children, helping them learn to kind and helpful members of society. Though this is achieved through several different approaches, there are some techniques that are showcased in most of her books that help to guide the reader through her thought process. Appealing to the audience is a centrally important idea throughout literature where one's case is pleaded to the audience. Killingsworth defines Appeal in two ways, one of which is, “..’to plead one's case,’ usually before a higher authority.”(Killingsworth) where the reader is the one being beseeched by the author. In Mem Fox’s books, the audience generally consists of younger children, as the books themselves are predominantly picture books as that is at the upper bound of the children’s range of proximal development. By using a simple rhyme scheme, repetition, such as in Zoo Looking, and facial expression, and movement, such
With younger children being at a lower range of proximal development that undergraduate students, appealing to logic and to the character seemed less impactful as the children do not yet have the ability to deeply analyze the implied interactions within the text itself. Instead I chose to use emotions, of the characters, but also the reader. By adding emotion to the text, such as, “so Mary goes away angry”, or, “so James goes away crying”, I tried to get the reader to empathize with the situation presented in order to portray my project. In the illustrations I also tried to apply pathos to the characters with Mary frowning with an angry look on her face, and tears running down James face as he cried. Seeing in the past few weeks how much more children react to images that words, I wanted to make sure that I used the illustrations to the best of my ability, showing the emotions and reactions to how Billy acted and