Cage Bird and How to Say Nothing in 500 Words

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Recommended: Maya angelou: caged bird (analysis)

To truly compare or justify anything to be superior to something else, you must have more than one thing to compare. When I start to review narrative and descriptive essays, I have to try to understand what separates the two. I chose to compare “Caged Bird”, by Maya Angelou as my Descriptive essay and “How to say nothing in 500 words”, by Paul McHenry Roberts as my narrative essay. To me these two essays set themselves apart from each other, not just because of the different styles of writers, but the meaningful message that was delivered in both essays. While both of these essays have a strong message that it delivers, but only one truly keeps my attention, answers all of my questions, and helps me to imagine every word that is in the text. In the text of, “Essentials of College Writing”, it is stated, “Consider what would be interesting to you as a reader and what kinds of details and information you look for when you read a piece of personal writing”, (Connell, C. M., & Sole, K., (2013), Chapter 6. Section 6.2, paragraph 5). As a writer I believe it you have to grab the reader’s attention, answer whatever questions they have, and really help them imagine what they are reading. Initially, I was leaning to favor the descriptive essay, “The Caged Bird”, written by Maya Angelou, but after further consideration and critiques, I discovered that, “How to say nothing in 500 words”, written by Paul McHenry Roberts won me over. This change of mind came to me as I read each essay over again and then it was a clear choice of which essay was arguably the better style.
To be considered a good descriptive essay, according to what I read in, “Essentials of College Writing”, a descriptive essay must use specific language, use specific d...

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...or future papers, regardless if they are narrative essays or not, this is a great approach that I think can improve my academic writing skills.
As I stated earlier, both of these essays have a strong message that it delivers, but only one truly keeps my attention, answers all of my questions, and helps me to imagine every word that is in the text. It is clear that the narrative essay is superior to the descriptive because of all of the details that are utilized to prepare the narrative and the impact that the narrative essay has on the reader. No one can deny that both are a good choice, but this narrative actually is structured better than the descriptive essay and it just has a completion feeling that you can kind of anticipate because of the way the narrative began. Once again the narrative essay indisputably suffices all of the reader’s needs while reading.

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