"Using Apperance To Characterize"

In Advanced Composition class, we were told to blog about a variety of things. In this blog I chose to respond to an article from Writer Magazine.

On the Writer Magazine website, there is an article called "Using Appearance To Characterize." In this article there is a question being answered and the question that is proposed is, "I understand appearance is often cited as one way to characterize, but isn’t this misleading?" The writers response to this article is that is can tell a lot about his personality.

I believe this is true but it can also be misleading as the question states.

These people may have to dress or act a certain way whither they like it or not. Sometimes the appearance of a character is quite misleading. The well dressed, snazzy lawyer's son may not want to dress in the thousand dollar suit and may not want to wear all of those expensive things but must because it's his father's retirement party. The way that people look don't always give away the personality but may shield them from their actual personality. The way that people act is based on their environment. So yes, I do believe that appearance being used to characterize is often misleading to a point.

At times though, this appearance may be exactly correlated to the characterization. The woman that is one the side of the street in 6 inch heels and a mini skirt is actually a prostitute. When the author wants to have the character be characterized by their appearance then they will  do so.

http://www.writermag.com/Columns/Ask%20The%20Writer/2011/02/Using%20appearance%20to%20characterize.aspx