Dearly disconnected

Comparison and Contrast: Showing Similarities and Differences

WRITING QUICK START

the photograph on the opposite page showing someone using Wii to playing a game of golf. Think about how simulating the play of a sport

Wii is similar to and different from actually playing the sport. Make two lists-ways that playing the real sport and the Wii version are

and ways that the real and Wii versions are different. You might choose write about golf or select a different sport. In your lists, include details

the level of physical activity, types of skills required, interaction with players, the setting. and so on. Then write a paragraph comparing the

'xnpripncp<; of playing the sport using Wii and playing the actual sport.

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374 CHAPTER 16 COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

WRITING A COMPARISON OR CONTRAST ESSAY

Your paragraph about playing the actual and the Wii versions of a Sport is an example of comparison-and-contrast writing. You may have written about the similarities and differences in equipment required, physical exertion involved, and so forth. In addi­ tion, you probably organized your paragraph in one of two ways: (1) by writing about playing the Wii version and then writing about playing the actual sport (or vice versa) or (2) by discussing each point of similarity or difference with examples from Wii and the actual sport. This chapter will show you how to write effective comparison or contrast essa}'5 as well as how to incorporate comparison and contrast into essays using orher patterns of development.

What Are Comparison and Contrast?

Using comparison and contrast involves looking at both similarities and differences. AnalYLing similarities and differences is a useful decision-making skill that daily. You make comparisons when you shop for a pair of jeans, select a sandwich in the cafeteria, Or choose a television program to watch. You also compare alternatives when you make important decisions about which college to attend, which field to ma­ jor in, and which person to date.

You will find many occasions to use comparison and contrast in the writing you do in college and on the job (see the accompanying box for a few examples). In most essays of this type you will use one of two primary methods of organization, as the following two readings illustrate. The first essay, "Amusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion Out Most Intelligent Newspaper?" by Greg Beato, uses a point­ by-point organization. The writer moves back and form between his two subjects (The Onion and traditional newspapers), comparing them on me basis of several key points or characteristics. The second essay, Ian Frazier's "Dearly Disconnected," uses a subject­ by-subject organ.iza.tion. Here the author describes the key points or characteristics of one subject (pay phones) before moving on to those of his other subject (cell phones).

GREG 375

POINT-BY-POINT ORGANIZATION

Amusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion Our Most Intelligent Newspaper? Greg Beato

Greg Beato is a San Francisco-based writer who has written for such publications as Spin, Wired, Business 2.0, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He created the webzine Traff1c in 1995 and was a frequent contributor to the webzlne Suck. cam from 1996 to 2000. He also main­ tains a blog about media and culture, Soundbitten, which he started in 1997. This essay was published in Reason, a libertarian magazine, in 2007. As you read, notice how Beato uses comparison and contrast to make his case for the validity of "fake news••

In August 1988, college junior Tim Keck borrowed $7,000 from his mom, rented a Mac 1 Plus, and published a twelve-page newspaper. His ambition was hardly the stuff of future Journalism symposiums: He wanted to create a compelling way to deliver adver­ tising to his fellow students. Part of the first issue's front page was devoted to a story about a monster running amok at a local lake; the rest was reserved for beer and pizza coupons.

Almost twenty years later, The Onion stands as one of the newspaper industry's few 2 great success stories in the post-newspaper era. Currently, it prints 710,000 copies of each weekly edition, roughly 6,000 more than the Denver Post, the nation's ninth. largest daily. Its syndicated radio dispatches reach a weekly audience of one million, and it recently started producing video clips too. Roughly three thousand local adver­ tisers keep The Onion afloat, and the paper plans to add 170 employees to its staff of 130 this year.

Online it attracts more than two million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and 3 The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google. and The Onion pops up first. But type "best practices for newspapers' into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest them. selves ortheir newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes

ueh of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but ~onethe- in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

other newspapers desperately add gardening sections. ask readers to share 4 favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for

question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news_ fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn't ask readers to post their comments

end of stories, altow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage It makes no effort to convince readers that it realty does understand their

and exists only to serve them. The Onion's journalists concentrate on writing and then getting them out there in a variety offormats. and this relatively old­

approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print during the last three years? Yet as traditional newspapers fail to draw

376 CHAPTER 115 COMPARISON AND CONTRAST ----~"'~

readers, only industry mavericks like the New York Times' Jayson Blair and USA Today's Jack Kelley have looked to The Onion for inspiration.

One reason The Onion isn't taken more seriously is that it's actually fun to read. In 1985 the cultural critic Neil Postman published the influential Amusing Ourselves to Death, which warned of the fate that would befall us if public discourse were allowed to become substantially more entertaining than, say, a Neil Postman book. Today

newspapers are eager to entertain - in their Travel, Food, and Style sections, that is.

But even as scope creep has made the average big·city tree killer less portable than a

ten-year-old laptop, hard news invariably comes in a single flavor: Double Objectivity

Sludge.

Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, It can't be very good foryott. But do The ctnion and its more fact-based acolytes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, monitor current events and the way the news media report on them any less rigorously than, say, the

Columbia Journalism Review or USA Today? During the last few years, multiple surveys by the Pew Research Center and the

Annenberg Public Policy Center have found that viewers of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are among America's most informed citizens. Now, it may be that Jon Stewart isn't making anyone smarter; perhaps America's most informed citizens

simply prefer comedy over the stentorian drivel the network anchormannequins dis­

pense. But at the very least, such surveys suggest that news sharpened with satire

doesn't cause the intellectual coronaries Postman predicted. Instead, it seems to

correlate with engagement.

It's easy to see why readers connect with The Onion, and it's not just the jokes: De­ 9 spite its "fake news" purview, it's an extremely honest publication, Most dailies, espe·

ciallythose in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they're focused more

on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind.

The Onion takes the opposite approach. It delights in crapping on pieties and regula~y publishes stories guaranteed to upset someone: "Christ Kills Two, Injures Seven, in

Abortion·Clinic Attack." "Heroic PETA Commandos Kill 49, Save Rabbit." "Gay Pride

IAN FRAZIER DEARLY DISCONNECTED 377

Siegel once told a lecture audience that the paper was "very nearly sued out of

existence» after it ran a story with the headline "Dying Boy Gets Wish: To Pork Janet

Jackson," But if this irreverence is sometimes economically inconvenient, it's also a

major reason for the publication's popularity. It's a refreshing antidote to the he-said/ she·said balancing acts that leave so many dailies sounding mealy-mouthed. And

while The Onion may not adhere to the facts too strictly, it would no doubt place high if the Pew Research Center ever included it in a survey ranking America's most trusted news sources.

During the last few years, big-city dailies have begun to introduce "commuter" pa­

pers that function as lite versions of their original fare. These publications share some

of The Onion's attributes: They're free, they're tablOids, and most of their stories are l>ite-sized, But whik! they !!lay be less filling, they still taste bland_ You have to wonder: Why stop at price and paper size? Why not adopt the brutal frankness, the willingness

to pierce orthodoxies of all political and cultural stripes, and apply these attributes to a genuinely reported daily newspaper?

Today's publishers give comic strips less and less space. Editorial cartoonists and

folksy syndicated humorists have been nearly eradicated. Such changes have helped

make newspapers more entertaining-or at least less dull-but they're just a start,

Until today's front pages can amuse our staunchest defenders of journalistic integrity to severe dyspepSia, if not death, they're not trying hard enough.

SUBJECT-BY-SUBJECT ORGANIZATION

Dearly Disconnected Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier is an American writer and humorist whose books include Great Plains (1989), family (1996), Travels In Siberia (2010), and several collections of columns he wrote for The New Yorker magazine both as a staff writer and independently. The following essay

12

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Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance of Gays Back 50 Years." There's no predictable

ideology running through those headlines, just a desire to express some rude, blunt

truth aboutthe world.

One common complaint about newspapers is that they're too negative, too focused

on bad news, too obsessed with the most unpleasant aspects of life. The Onion shows how wrong this characterization is. how gingerly most newspapers dance around the

unrelenting awfulness of life and refuse to acknowledge the limits of our tolerance

and compassion. The perfunctory coverage that traditional newspapers give disasters

in countries cursed with relatability issues is reduced to its bare, dismal essence:

"15,000 Brown People Dead Somewhere." Beggars aren't grist for Pulitzers, just

lines: "Man Can't Decide Whether to Give Sandwich to Homeless or Ducks." of the human spirit are as rare as vegans at an NRA barbecue: "loved Ones Recall

Man's Cowardly Battle with Cancer." Such headlines come with a cost, of course. Outraged readers have convinced

advertisers to pull ads. Ginger Rogers and Denzel Washington, among other celebri­

ties, have objected to stories featuring their names, and former Onion editor Robert

was adapted from a column that appeared in MotherJones magazine in 2000. As you read, highlight the key points FraZier makes about pay phones and cell phones and his attitude toward each.

was living by myself in an A-frame cabin in northwestern Mon­ tana. The cabin's interior was a Single high-ceilinged room, and at the center of the

mounted on the rough-hewn log that held up the ceiling beam, was a tele. phone. The woman I would marry was living in Sarasota, Florida, and the distance

between us suggests how well we were getting along at the time. We had not been in

for several months; she had no phone. One day she decided to call me from a phone. We talked for a while, and after her coins ran out I jotted the number on

wood beside my phone and called her back. A day or two later, thinking about the wanted to talk to her again. The only number I had for her was the pay phone

I'd written down.

pay phone was on the street some blocks from the apartment where she

. As it happened, though, she had just stepped out to do some errands a few

378 CHAPTER 15 COMPARISON AND CONTRAST

minutes before I called, and she was passing by on the sidewalk when the phone rang. She had no reason to think that a public phone ringing on a busy street would be for her. She stopped, listened to it ring again, and picked up the receiver. Love is pure luck; somehow I had known she would answer, and she had known it would he me.

Long afterwards, on a trip to Disney World in Orlando with our two kids, then aged six and two, we made a special detour to Sarasota to show them the pay phone. It didn't impress them much. It's just a nondescript Bell Atlantic pay phone on the ce­ ment wall of a building, by the vestibule. But its ordinariness and even boringness only make me like it more; ordinary places where extraordinary events have occurred are my favorite kind. On my mental map of Florida that pay phone is a landmark looming ahove the city it occupies, and a notable, if private, historic site.

I'm interested in pay phones in general these days, especially when I get the feel­ ing that they are about to go away. Technology, in the form of sleek little phones in our pockets, has swept on hythem and made them begin to seem antique. My lifelong en· tanglement with pay phones dates me; when I was young they were just there, a given, often as stuhhorn and uncongenial as the curbstone underfoot. They were instruments of torture sometimes. You had to feed them fistfuls of change in those pre-phone-card days, and the operator was a real person who stood maddeningly between you and whomever you were trying to call. And when the call went wrong, as communication often does, the pay phone gave you a focus for your rage. Pay phones were always getting smashed up, the receivers shattered to hits against the booth, the coin slots jammed with chewing gum, the cords yanked out and unraveled to the floor.

There was always a touch of seediness and sadness to pay phones, and a sense of transience. Drug dealers made calls from them, and shady types who did not want their whereahouts known, and otherwise respectable people planning assignations, and people too poorto have phones of their own. In the movies, any characterwho used a pay phone was either in trouble or contemplating a crime_ Mostly, pay phones evoked the mundane: UHoney, I'm just leaving. I'll he there soon." But you could teU that a lot of undifferentiated humanity had flowed through these places, and that in the muteness of each pay phone's little space, wild emotion had howled.

The phone on the wall of the concession stand at Redwood Pool, where I used to stand dripping and call my mom to come and pick me up; the sweaty phones used almost only by men in the hallway outside the maternity ward at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York; the phone in the old wood-paneled phone booth with leaded glass windows in the drugstore in my Ohio hometown - each one is as specific as a birthmark, a point on earth unlike any other. Recently I went back to New York City after a long absence and tried to find a working pay phone. I picked up one receiver after the next with success. Meanwhile, as I scanned down the long hlock, I counted half a dozen or pedestrians talking on their cell phones_