Readers love the story of the predator and the prey, regardless of where or with whom the sympathy falls. A tale of survival or near-survival keeps us craving more, and if the creator or messenger of that story can secretly divulge wisdom along the way, then both reader and author benefit.
Using a similar objective and a common motivation for their pieces, we can see that both Plumwood and Stark's essays seek to educate their reader, while masking this behind a veil of entertainment. Furthermore, both pieces use contrasting writing styles to portray their stories of fight or flight, and to portray a theme that mankind needs to humble itself in regards to nature. Peter Stark's essay "The Sting of the Assassin" seeks to relate a story of one of the world's more deadly jellyfish, the box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri). Stark weaves his informative essay with a purely fictional tale regarding struggling newlyweds. Val Plumwood's essay "Being Prey" contains none of the dialogue that "Assassin" uses, but the story may even be more powerful as the reader knows this story not only could happen, but did.
[...] Short Story Review Readers love the story of the predator and the prey, regardless of where or with whom the sympathy falls. A tale of survival or near-survival keeps us craving more, and if the creator or messenger of that story can secretly divulge wisdom along the way, then both reader and author benefit. Using a similar objective and a common motivation for their pieces, we can see that both Plumwood and Stark's essays seek to educate their reader, while masking this behind a veil of entertainment. [...]
[...] True, her story entertains as well. Placing the action of her attack in the earlier pages of her article was no accident. It simply lures her audience in so that her message and purpose can be delivered in full: human beings are not as holy as we may like to believe, and a meal's a meal to a hungry mouth. The most distinctive difference between these two papers stands in their writing techniques and writing approaches. As mentioned earlier, Stark writes “Assassin” in parts, intermingling his fictional monster tale with his fact-checked informative essay. [...]
[...] Just two minutes later his eyes are filled with tears for the same woman (Stark 265). With a desire to shine light on the animal world from a different perspective , both Peter Stark's essay Sting of the Assassin” and Val Plumwood's essay “Being Prey” use a captivating account of an attack to let the reader know that we too may become the hunted. Both essays use an initial entertaining story to catch the readers' eye, and, once that eye cannot turn away, unfolds an angle and a moral it may not [...]
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