The Great Fire Of London In 1661 Analysis

This essay attempts to compare, analyse and contrast two texts. Text A being an adaptation of a dairy entry of Samuel Pepys about the Great Fire of London in 1666, text B being a news article on a fire that devastated Tasmania a few year ago.
Do the texts have similarities? Despite there being about a 300-year difference between the two articles written there are actually quite a few similarities. Firstly, both the texts are written in first person and in a personal way. They use the same pronouns, the pronouns being ‘I’ and ‘us’. They both also talk about a very similar topic being a fire that took the lives and housing if a lot of people. Another similarity between them is that the people with the most power were the ones to issue assistance.
Like mentioned before there is the about 300-year difference between the two texts. Which does show its differences. The diary entry is a lot more personal with the use of the personal pronoun I being in just about every sentence. However, despite this the diary entry uses a lot more formal and descriptive language than the news article. A good example of the descriptive language would be at the end of the dairy entry “, in a most Horrid malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire”. Which is a lot more descriptive than “At least 100 properties have been de5troyed and thousands of people have been left stranded by bushfires that are continuing to rage out of control in Tasmania”. The dairy entry also uses linguistic devices like personification and similes more than the news article. This could be in order to give the reader a feeling of what the tragedy might have looked like, which draws overall into the descriptive language used in the dairy. “in a most Horrid malicious bloody flame” and “the fire running further” are both examples of times when Pepys used personification to describe the fire. The news article on the other hand uses a lot more specifics (where the fire spread to, how many people were saved, how many people were killed etc.). It also uses a lot of quotes taken from Green in order to prove its authenticity or to show and put reader’s minds to ease that a lot of effort had been put into trying to
One was a hands on in the heart of the fire seeing things and writing them down as one of the onlookers of the fire. The other text was more hands off; it was written after the fire using information that were gathered after the fire was extinguished. The names of the author of text A is not directly viewed in the text rather at the bottom for the sake of context to the person reading the extract. Whereas the author of text B is left unknown not even put at the bottom of the extract.
Text B seems to be the more professional one, it was written by a journalist for a website. Text A does seem to be quite unprofessional in the sense that it talks more about what the author saw and did as opposed to how text B was written. It could have been a person of the upper class possibly someone who had something to do with the king. Text B’s audience seems to be anyone who was interested or worried about the tragedy and wanted to know more of the facts. Text A rather sounded like it was written for the author himself and not purposefully meant for others to