by Gaby Rodriguez for Seventeen Magazine (March 2012)
This article was about a 17 year old girl who faked a pregnancy as a social experiment. The only people in on the secret was her mom, boyfriend, best friend, and school principal. After going along with her story for 6 months, in an assembly she reveals to the school that it was fake. She did this in an effort to showcase the stereotypes made at family's with history of teen pregnancy as well as being Hispanic and from a small town.
The context of this piece is at a point in our history when teen pregnancy is something that is seen frequently and showcased in the news as well as television shows, such as 16 & Pregnant and Teen Mom.
The purpose of this piece was to get the story of this courageous teen to teenagers. It shows how easily people are judged and stereotyped, regardless of what the one who is judging knows or doesn't know about that person.
The audience of this article is all Seventeen magazine readers, which is mainly teenage girls.
Rhetorical Devices:
- Point of View- This article is written in a diary format with Gaby (the teen carrying out the experiment) as the narrator. It is split into periods of time from the beginning of the experiment to the reveal. This helps the reader to understand exactly how she felt and what she went through.
- Side Article- A great feature of this article was a mini side article written by Gaby's boyfriend, who was in on the experiment and went along with it. He shares how difficult it was for him as well since he was being judged as a teen dad.
I think that the author accomplished her purpose because this article was so interesting. I greatly respect Gaby for the courage she had to follow through with this experiment. I think that this was so interesting to read about and really made me think about the way I view others.
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