American Fat
Kimberly 9/21/2012 Essay
Writers who have the same or similar ideas often interpret and present them in many different ways. Tone and style are two key factors that can differ one writers work from another. In American Fat by Russell Baker, he gets his point across in a more comical way as opposed to Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. George Orwell gets his point across in a more formal way with more facts and research. Even though both writers share the same idea about how words in the English language are commonly used unnecessarily, they presented their arguments in very different ways. In George Orwell’s passage, his tone was more critical and serious and his style was specific and formal. In his writing he used many references and details to support his ideas in the passage. He wrote about how the English language has progressively gotten worse because of people using too many sophisticated words in order to sound smart, but resulting in losing the meaning in what they are trying to say. In order to prove his point by researching passages that are guilty of using unnecessary words. For example, on page 541 he stated, “These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:” This shows the amount of research he did and the amount of thought process put into his work. In addition, he separates his passage into and organized list of topics that are commonly used wrong in the English language such as Dying Metaphors, Operations or Verbal False Limbs, Pretentious Diction, and Meaningless Words. This shows he organized his thoughts to clearly get his point across to his readers in a well written passage. All of these examples show that
Writers who have the same or similar ideas often interpret and present them in many different ways. Tone and style are two key factors that can differ one writers work from another. In American Fat by Russell Baker, he gets his point across in a more comical way as opposed to Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. George Orwell gets his point across in a more formal way with more facts and research. Even though both writers share the same idea about how words in the English language are commonly used unnecessarily, they presented their arguments in very different ways. In George Orwell’s passage, his tone was more critical and serious and his style was specific and formal. In his writing he used many references and details to support his ideas in the passage. He wrote about how the English language has progressively gotten worse because of people using too many sophisticated words in order to sound smart, but resulting in losing the meaning in what they are trying to say. In order to prove his point by researching passages that are guilty of using unnecessary words. For example, on page 541 he stated, “These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad – I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen – but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:” This shows the amount of research he did and the amount of thought process put into his work. In addition, he separates his passage into and organized list of topics that are commonly used wrong in the English language such as Dying Metaphors, Operations or Verbal False Limbs, Pretentious Diction, and Meaningless Words. This shows he organized his thoughts to clearly get his point across to his readers in a well written passage. All of these examples show that