Maggie Hamilton What's Ns Summary

The expository text What’s happening to our girls? written my Maggie Hamilton presents the issue that girls all over the world feel pressures at some stage of their lives. Hamilton presents this idea to the reader in a negative way in comparison to how popular culture and wider society encourages it. As girls are growing up, they feel pressures regarding their desires to be a woman, body image and pressures from parents and teachers. Hamilton expresses these ideas through the use of expository conventions such as interviews, facts and expert opinion.

Young girls ranging from the ages of 3-12 are becoming more and more like teenagers. Their clothes are getting skimpier and their desires are constantly growing. The expository text What 's
By now they’re more than ready to leave their little-girl self behind.” (Pg. 31) This is explaining how girls are losing their valuable and irreplaceable childhood experiences that they are now missing out on due to the strong influences that popular culture has on them. Hamilton is encouraging the parents of these young girls to not spoil their children by giving them everything they desire but to engage them within their community and to mix with a variety of people from different generations. Another convention used to convey the message is facts. An example of this in the text is “In one study of girls aged 5-8, over a quarter of the 5-year-old-girls wished they were thinner.”(Pg.62) These facts support the idea that girls are growing up too fast and that these are the issues that adults should be worrying about, not young girls. In popular culture, these ideas are also presented, but in a different way. Girls are being encouraged to have the latest technology, clothes and makeup through the use of images in magazines. Magazine companies use specific images to encourage girls to step into the world of woman hood. An example of this is in one Bliss magazine, they published the A-Z of sex. This is handing out unnecessary information