Compare And Contrast Descriptive And Descriptive Essay

When people begin to write a paper, whether it is for a college assignment or just personal writing, there always seems to be a type of stylistic choice or way of going about writing that they prefer to do. Each different essay has its merit depending on what you intend to write about, and each essay has several differences found when writing them. This essay has the purpose of defining narrative and descriptive essay. It also will compare and contrast each, as well as describing, comparing, and contrasting one narrative and one descriptive essay from our previous reading addressing the structural components found in each, and finally telling which type of essay I personally find superior.

The essays I have chosen to compare are “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words” (Roberts, P.M.) and “Fish Cheeks” (Tan, A.) as well as serving to prove why the descriptive style of writing is in my opinion superior to the narrative style. Personally, I feel that the descriptive essay is superior to the narrative essay because description seems to come more naturally to people than narrative writing would, and is a more effective way of persuading someone to your point of view.

The first step in comparing and contrasting the descriptive and narrative styles of writing is to define each one of these terms. Description (found in the descriptive writing style) is a pattern of writing that can be defined as “painting pictures with words”. (Connell C.M. and Sole, K. Essentials of College Writing.) Essentially what this means is to better mentally show the reader what exactly it is you are describing to them as you write your essay. You want the reader to start thinking about exactly what it is you are telling them and to form his or her own mental i...

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...mas dinner. “How to Say Nothing in 500 Words” (Roberts, P.M) Is more of a narrative because its main purpose is teaching a lesson rather than telling a story.

Much like the basic narrative and descriptive essay, just because the two essays I chose to compare are written differently as far as their style choice, doesn’t mean that there are no similarities. Both Essays are written with a story to catch the reader’s attention and make you feel like you are a part of it. Both Robert’s and Tan’s stories tell of a struggle in a teenager or college student’s life. Robert’s writes about a college student with the task of writing an assignment on a weekend that he would much rather go out and socialize, Tan writes about a teenage girl desperate to be accepted and to be liked back by her crush. And finally, both truly are written with some kind of moral or lesson in mind