Out of this week’s readings, I much preferred the short story, Fear & Loathing in America to The New York Times article. I found myself rather bored reading the article about the many sporting events being called off, immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I will admit that I am not much of a sports fan - especially not American sports teams – however I tried to read the article with an open mind. Litsky and Williams (2011) wrote the article in a very fact-based, typical news story way, which meant that if the reader is not at all interested in the subject matter, the narrative style does nothing to make the reader interested in reading on. Even the title sparked little interest; I was surprised they did not use the words, ‘terrorist attacks’ in the title, as most media like to grab the reader’s attention immediately.

Thompson (2011) on the other hand, wrote a completely different kettle of fish that did not focus so much on sport, but more about the shocking 9/11 attacks. Thompson (2011) aptly described, “Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter …show more content…
I immediately knew my attention would be kept reading this story. Comparing the attacks to being worse than any other U.S. disaster in history, the reader is suddenly thrown into the author’s mind frame; fresh with shock and disbelief, like so many other people watching with horror from around the globe. Attention-grabbing words like, “utterly destroy... Boom! Boom! Just like that” (Thompson, 2011, para. 5) to describe the fall of Manhattan’s Twin Towers, and throwing provocative statements at the reader like, “We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens” (para. 9) provokes questions, seeks someone to blame, and perhaps cleverly tries to gain a unity of thinking between author and