Critique : “It is still beauty before brains” by Chok Suat Ling

     The article “It is still beauty before brains” by Chok Suat Ling is mainly about the unfair judging of women according to their looks but not their potential.

        The idea provided by the writer is unclear as there is a lack of elaborations in a few of her points. There are examples or other issues that are not further elaborated by the writer. For example, the sentence “So, why do we need men again?” is not elaborated at all. The writer failed to explain and relate men and the judging of women by appearance. It is not stated that only men will judge women by their looks or is it that both men and women judge women by their physical appearance.

      Moreover, the writer is vey biased toward the female. In the text, the writer only focuses on the problem where women are judged by their looks but men are not. But, the writer did not provide or discuss any evidence to support her statement and it is only her opinion that females are being judged by their looks.

      Overall, the writer is elaborating about how women are being judged by their looks and how that is unfair. The author is found to be bias towards the female and some of her statements are not elaborated enough.

Critique – It is still beauty before brains

The article ‘It is still beauty before brains’ discussed about  how women are still judged by their physical appearance and their achievements are overlooked.

Although the author is biased towards female, some of her opinions are actually true and worth to be debated over. I agree with the opinion of author that female nowadays are too often assessed on their physical appearance and how they dress up rather than their performance. The author has provided a few convincing examples, showing that female are actually still be judged based on their look. For instance, ‘During the London Olympics this year, female athletes spoke out against the public scrutiny of their body size rather than their fitness and skills’. It is very disappointing that all their effort and achievements are overlooked while their physical appearance become the main topic of discussion, noted the career of an athlete has nothing to do with their physical appearance. In this modern era, if female were to be judged, they should be judged based on their working ability and NOT based on their outlook.

Human, regardless of their age, sex and race, do judge people.  It is true that female too judged male by their physical appearance. However, in my point of view, female are often the victims of judgment as female are more likely to be affected by judgments on their physical appearance. Judgments directed to female are doing more harm than that directed to male - ‘…the athletes might be at a higher risk of succumbing to eating disorders.’

In a nutshell, people, no matter male or female, should stop judging people based on their outlook. There are things that are far more significant than outlook itself. Physical appearance should not be the barrier that holding women back.

 

critique by me

‘It is still beauty before brain’,

This article, by Chok Suat Ling is mainly focusing on issue faced by women where they are being judged based on their look rather than their intelligence and other skills.

We can see that the author was actually being biased because she was only mentioning about women being judged by looks, making it looks like only the women are being treated in such way. She did not mention anything about men having the same issue. She also tried to gain support on her article from the female readers by saying “so why do we need men”.

Next, the author used so many examples in her article but failed to elaborate and give clear references on those examples, making her statements questionable. For instance, she gave out a statement saying “a survey done by a women’s magazine…” in paragraph 5. The name, author and the publishing date of the magazine was not mentioned.

Finally, the choice of words used was clear and understandable. It can be said that a wide range of people are able to understand the ideas from this article. However, the word ‘carpus callosum’ cannot be understood by all readers.

In conclusion, the author has a clear intention on the issue she raised though being bias. 

Critique2.0

     The article 'At Face Value' composed by Chok Suat Ling addresses the significance of looks on the judgement against women nowadays.

     In the article the writer has mentioned about the effect of appearance on the job opportunity for women in which she says that the so called good looking women are the ones who easily get through their jobs.She has given a statistic as follows to support her idea,"survey by Women's magazine has revealed that seventy eight percent of respondents agreeing that being attractive helped them to get on better in their jobs,while  sixty percent thought overweight women were being discriminated against".Her statistics are not known to be accurate as she has not given additional information on the source from which she took the statistics.She could have at least given the name of the author who wrote the article in Women's magazine or the month it was published.

   Furthermore,the writer has related her topic to a newsreader which I feel is not strong enough to support her idea that  brain comes before beauty.She has stated that,"well-known British presenter Fiona Bruce once admitted that female newsreaders were often judged on their appearance in a way that their male counterparts were not".I believe the person that she has used as an example, is not recognised widely by commoners.So, she should have mentioned someone more familiar to common readers as an example.

As a whole, based on the above points,the writer should get her facts straight and pick the best example to elaborate on her opinion.      

Critique 1.0

     The article 'At Face Value' written by Chok Suat Ling points out appearance as a setback for modern women to become high flyers in their life.

    The beginning of her article is pretty inspiring as she has highlighted some successful women to have been broken free from the age old notion that women are followers.This has been proven in the following extraction,"Datuk Rasammah Bhupalan,Puan Sri Sukumari Sekhar,Professor Datuk Dr Fatimah Hamid Don and Tun Fatimah Hashim(posthumous) were among several formidable women who broke through the psychological and manmade barriers to etch a name for themselves in their time".However,her examples are vague because she has just stated names without specifying their respective achievements.

   Besides that, the author has mentioned about the leap taken by women in the academic prospect where she wrote,"March forwarded by women has been relentless.One example,they constituted just 10 percent of undergraduates,now it is seventy percent.Two thirds of the student population at public universities are female".Eventhough this is an inspiring fact,yet I do not see the correlation of this statement to her topic which is about the impact of women's appearance on their achievement.I believe appearance has no effect on the academic excellence of women.

    The usage of words by the author at some parts in the article is ambiguous as common readers would find it hard to understand what she is trying to convey.This can be seen clearly in the following extraction,"girls have a thicker corpus callosum-they are wired differently and are thus better in many respects".

    Therefore, I feel that the writer has to conduct further research on her topic to substantiate her facts and she should try to convey her piece of mind in a simple rather clear manner.
       

Critique 2

          The article "It is still beauty before Brains", penned down by Chok Suat Ling expresses how women are being judged based on their appearance and not on what they have to offer the community. I personally feel that the author, as a woman, is being biased towards the opposed sex as she never revealed how men are judged on the first impression as well.

          Next, it prompts the readers to question on where she obtained the evidences in her essay from. For example, she stated about a survey done by a woman's magazine. The statement turns out to be vague as she did not indicate which woman's magazine she was referring to. The proofs were not declared so the values could have been inflated by the author in order to make the article substantial.

          Furthermore, the details given are not applicable to the article. The title "It is still Beauty before Brains" gives me the idea that the author composed on how women are judged on their appearance instead of their wisdom. At first, she talked about how women are dominating the universities these days, but as we read through the article, she started to mention about newsreaders, sports women and stewardesses. The particulars do not represent her main title, thus, the latter paragraphs do not seem to correlate with the former.

          However, her choice of words is expansive. She used scientific terms such as corpus callosum and electrophoresis. Although the words could have been easily misinterpreted by some of the readers, it shows how wide the author's vocabulary is. What’s good is that the author did not try too hard in boasting her vast vocabulary. Simple words, picked by the author made the article an easy read.

          In the nut shell, the author is clever as she used simple words that could be understood by the majority of the readers. However, she needs to pronounce the correctness of her statements, especially those that she extracted out of a magazine's survey or research studies so that the ambiguity is abridged. Last but not least, the article would have been better if the author had elaborated the given specifics and restructured her sentences in order to make the points correlative to each other.

Critique 1 (:

“It is still beauty before brains” by Chok Suat Ling talks about the situation where physical appearance has been prioritized before ability and capability.

In the article, the writer explains how women in this modern society have proven themselves capable of achieving great things. One of the examples is nominating from merely 10 per cent of the undergraduates to 70 per cent, which is a vast difference. The writer also mentions that “Two-third of the student population at public universities are female.”. I agree with the writer that women are indeed “…breaking barriers, records, and creating history.”. The writer is convincing enough in stating that women have captivated the attention of the nation with not only words, but also deeds.

The writer later questions how women, despite their relentless and, successful efforts in achieving heights people think they couldn’t reach, are still judged based on their physical appearance even in this “…age of liberated thought and modern sensibility.”. I think the writer has given a good example on how women have been affected by the society’s judgement that even most female athletes are not satisfied with their own body image from a study done by Universiti Putra Malaysia. The writer even says that if female athletes were to feel insecure about how they look like, “...what of ‘regular’ women?”. The writer is rather shocked on how women are willing to risk their health or even their lives merely for the sake of being beautiful, even at a young age. The writer also criticizes contest like beauty pageants “...reinforces the message that looks are the most important quality in women...”.

I agree with the writer that women should be respected for who they are and for what they have done even when their looks may not seem attractive to some people.