Develop an essay that sets side by side for analysis two ways of seeing the same thing. One model for this is Mark Twain’s “Two Ways of Seeing a River.” See that file in the COMPARISON / CONTRAST module. Twain worked on a steamboat as a pilot before he became a famous novelist and humorist. His essay shows how he came to see in two different ways one thing CENTRAL to his job: the river, itself.
Twain has a BASIS for juxtaposing the river—his personal engagement with it. To explain, when he was a novice on the river and the job was new to him, he saw the river’s features emotionally. In the first part of the essay, all the miniscule features of the river’s surface—especially at sundown in the fading light—connected to his appreciation of natural beauty, his idealized and romanticized (and even naïve) attraction to the colors, movements, and other elements of the water. Using subjective descriiption, Twain writes poetically (some might say gushingly, though beautifully) about these details and reveals his own personal reaction to each detail’s lovely aesthetic [look it up] quality.
In the second part of the essay, though, Twain acknowledges how time and experience impact one’s engagement with a part of his or her world—in Twain’s case, the river which was THE source and location of his job. Notice how his elegant and poetic language from the essay’s first half shifts to a more objective and technical accounting of the very same details he first rhapsodizes [look it up] about. From the perspective of a veteran steamboat pilot, now, he sees the river more professionally and addresses the VERY SAME colors and movements and other elements of the water in light of his appreciation for their practical application to his job—avoiding a catastrophe in the river. Indeed, wrecks of 19th-century commercial river vessels litter the bottoms of the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri and other major rivers.
Last Completed Projects
| topic title | academic level | Writer | delivered |
|---|