Features of Writing, Essay Example

The tone of the two pieces of writing are very different.  While the speech indicates an underlying positive attitude towards the future, despite the growing social, political, and environmental challenges that are being faced, the tone of the poem indicates a more pessimistic attitude, primarily due to the circumstances that the writer had gone through. The poem, rather than being inspiring, is intended to draw attention to the underlying social realities that society should be paying attention to.  However, in this aspect, they are similar.  They both attempt to draw attention to the world’s problems in their details.  While the speech does this in a way that challenges the graduating students to use their educations for the betterment of the world, the poem uses the history of the writer in order to express the need to challenge the underlying assumptions of society.

While the speech draws from history in order to provide evidence for its claims, the writer of the poem draws from their own experiences.  This presents another important distinction between these two pieces of writing.  The sources for the information are fundamentally different.  Furthermore, the organization of the two pieces of writing presents an important distinction.  While the speech is organized by starting with a congratulations for graduation, then using this premise as a call to a moral action on the part of the students.  The speaker then goes on to argue that this education has given them a resonsibiltiy.  The poem, on the other hand, uses the form of a poem to give a first-person account of the events that they went through before moving to the United States.  These types of writing are similar to the essays that I written so far in that they present an underlying opinion about the social realities that they are discussing.