A Comparison of the Wong and Zoellner Essays

A Comparison of the Wong and Zoellner Essays

Different essays can have different purposes and audience, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have similarities. Two short essays written for the newspaper by two different writers tell of their personal experience to convey their message. The essays by Wong and Zoellner relate the writer’s personal experiences and have similar genre, but have different readers and social and cultural contexts.

In The Struggle To Be An All-American Girl, Elizabeth Wong writes about her personal accounts of going to Chinese school to learn the language of her heritage and wanting to become All-American. Wong’s purpose for writing this essay was to inform others of how she grew up and now she regrets her discussion. The genre of the essay is a personal essay because narrative and descriptive passages are used as well as first person. This essay’s audience is other Chinese-American youth that want to become all-American or other that just want insight of her life. The social context of the essay is that there are others that are required to go to Chinese school and the cultural was the enlightenment regarding that not continuing to learn the language of her heritage. Wong’s essay is a simple little passage telling about her life to others in the same situation.

In I’m O.K., but You’re Not, Robert Zoellner writes about being a smoker in a restaurant and being asked to stop when the people who asked him to stop pollute the world he lives in just the same. Zoellner purpose for writing this essay was to inform others about people being hypocritical and also to explore how his courtesy changed. The genres of the essay are personal and argumentative. It is a personal essay because Zoellner uses