Teresa Zsuaffa's Spare Change

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In the essay “Spare Change”, the author, Teresa Zsuaffa, illustrates how the wealthy don’t treat people facing poverty with kindness and generosity, but in turn pass demeaning glares and degrading gestures, when not busy avoiding eye contact. She does so by writing an emotional experience, using imagery and personification whenever possible to get to the reader’s heart. Quite similarly, Nick Saul writes, in the essay “The Hunger Game”, about how the wealthy and people of social and political power such as “[the community’s] elected representatives” (Saul, 2013, p. 357) leave the problem of hunger on the shoulders of the foodbanks because they believe “feeding the hungry is already checked off [the government’s] collective to-do list” (Saul, …show more content…

For example, “Spare Change” uses emotions while “The Hunger Game” uses statistics. “Spare Change”, by Teresa Zsuaffa, is written in accordance with an experience in only one city in Canada (Toronto), and is immensely emotional whereas “The Hunger Game”, by Nick Saul, is written with work experience and consists of statistics and analysis and refers to whole of Canada. Saul, also, doesn’t use emotion filled words or personifications like Zsuaffa does. Targeting a more involved audience that gets riled up in the story being told, Zsuaffa writes about the insensitivity shown by the wealthy to a poor girl wearing worn and faded orange track pants and a large t-shirt, that’s far too big for her. Zsuaffa uses imagery and personification to get to the reader’s heart, writing “She must be about twenty-nine” (Zsuaffa, p. 151) though later in the essay revealing the girl’s actual age as eight years younger, giving the reader an idea of just how beaten-down the poor girl looked. On the other hand, Saul writes about, what he believes is the truth, about foodbanks in Canada. The essay opens describing a food warehouse in a positive way, which soon changes once the reader reaches paragraph three, where the negativity and truth of foodbanks start. Unlike Zsuaffa who wrote mainly based on her experience at one of the smallest cities in Canada, Saul considers all of Canada by adding in statistics such as “nearly 900,000 Canadians (38% of them children) turned to food banks each month last year” (Saul, 2013, p.356) to put more emphasis and stress on the need of more donations, charity and support from the wealthy and powerful of the

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