Style Showdown: Article vs Article

An article is always meant to inform the reader of something, but the way in which the writer decides to transmit this information varies a lot. A clear example is the distinctions and similarities between "Heeeere’s . . . Conan!!!" by Lynn Hirschberg, "The Cost Conundrum" by Atul Gawande, and "JA • • •" by Kevin Heldman. The three articles talk about a situation that is going on, but each of them uses techniques that are different from one another. An example is how Hirschberg uses style in his article. He comments on the history of Conan, and how it is his career works. For it he uses a very formal approach to the reader and includes a very minimum opinion part in it. Most of his data comes from things Conan has said and from factual things. This kind of style is very different from what the other two writers use. Gawande comes in to introducing his article by describing the environment followed by facts about the town he wants to talk about. He goes straight on to telling the most important information about the article, and at a point changes completely and puts himself into the story by telling his personal experience, "From the moment I arrived, I asked almost everyone I encountered about McAllen’s health costs—a businessman I met at the five-gate McAllen-Miller International Airport, the desk clerks at the Embassy Suites Hotel, a police-academy cadet at McDonald’s." Even though he himself is included in the story he is covering, most of the things he does and learns about are all about the issue of healthcare and all relate to what he began his article with.
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He also does not use many personal thoughts without using supporting evidence to back it up, like: "The place had virtually all the technology that you’d find at Harvard and Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, and, as I walked through that hospital on a dusty road in South Texas, this struck me as a remarkable thing." And you notice how it is that in this piece he also applies irony, telling about the huge amount of technology they had while they walked through a dusty road. Finally there's Heldman, who introduces to us the story of a guy he calls JA. His way of writing is completely focused on telling us the story of what JA does. His article is based more on opinion and his point of view on the subject. He rarely gets the point of view of other people, but rather sticks to relating a story from a particular point of view to try and get us to see it specifically from the view he wants us to see it. He could have chosen to do an article about graffiti in the streets and include his case, but in this case its first about his case and then how he graffiti’s. The style in which these writers express things is very different from one to another. Some may decide to use some literary devices, styles, and registers while some decide to use others depending on the audience they want to get to.