“Batting Clean Up and Striking Out” and “Neat People Vs. Sloppy People” Dave Barry’s essay “Batting Clean Up and Striking Out” was written during the 1980s. This essay is from the collection of essays in the book Dave Barry’s greatest hits written in 1988. Suzanne Britt’s essay “Neat People Vs. Sloppy People” appears in Britt’s collection show to tell. Both essays have severe differences in their tones and organization but they share allusions, symbols, and an element of the mess that give each of them certain particularities. Britt’s organization is subject by subject. She started talking about sloppy people first and neat people after and at the end, sum up their similarities and differences. For example, Britt says: “for all these reasons and more, sloppy people never get neat. They aim too high and wide” (256). She continues on like this talking about sloppy people. She does the same while talking about neat people: “Neat People are bums and clods at heart. They have cavalier attitudes toward possessions, including family heirlooms” (256). This method by discussing sloppy people fully and then turns to the discussion of the neat people makes her essay less funny. However, Barry’s organization is point by point. He considers one point at a time talking up men and women alternatively.
He says: But somewhere during the growth process, a hormonal secretion takes place in women that enable to see dirt that men can’t see, dirt at the level of molecules, whereas men don’t generally notice it until it forms clumps large enough to support agriculture” (261). This type of organization keeps his essay organizes by keeping each point men and women together. So the reader doesn’t have to remember too much information when reading the essay. Britt’s subject is sloppy people and neat people. She mentions it in her thesis statement: “I’ve finally figured out the difference between neat people and sloppy people. The distinction is, as always, moral. Neat people are lazy than sloppy people” (255). In reality, people don’t talk about this subject that much. It’s not a popular subject and it makes her essay less funny. In the contrary, Barry uses men and women as subjects.
He exposes it everywhere in his essay. For example, when he was talking about sports, he says that this is an area where men tend to feel very sensitive and women extremely callous (262). This is a subject of everyday life or an everyday situation and it’s a popular topic that makes his essay funnier and very interesting. Britt’s tone is sarcastic sometimes. She claims that neat people are bums and clods at heart (256). Think about someone who is a neat person, would this person read this essay? Not at all, because this essay is a turn-off. This person wouldn’t have any interest in reading an essay that degrades his or her personality. On the other hand, Barry’s tone is balanced. He makes jokes at both men and women equally.
He says “Men are sensitive and women callous” (262). Furthermore, he talks about his understanding of” filthy” as a bathroom in a bar he uses to frequent that have bacteria you could enter in a rodeo (262). He exhibits a humorous and serious attitude about men and women to get his point across in his essay, which makes the audience wants to read more about the story, about him and maybe wants to buy another book from him. During her entire essay, Britt mentions one personal experience that is not detailed. She writes: “I knew a neat person once who threw away a perfectly good dish drainer because it had mold on it” (257).
To continue she talks about the drainer that was too much trouble to wash. That was the only way she barely shares a personal experience that is not really clear. But Barry, in his essay, has a lot of personal experiences that create emotions and keep the reader interested. For example, his wife was asking him to clean the bathroom that he already sprayed Windex all over everything. He says “She is in there looking at the very walls I just Windexed, and she is seeing dirt! Everywhere!” (262). The funny thing about the story is he couldn’t tell her that he already cleaned it. All these personal experiences that Barry uses in his short essay augment his humor and make his essay very interesting to the reader. Britt makes a lot of claims and there is not much evidence to explain them.
For example “sloppy people, you see, are not really sloppy. Their sloppiness is merely the unfortunate consequence of their extreme moral attitude.” (255). She didn’t give further information to explain what she said. This makes her essay less funny and less interested in the readers. Even the thesis statement in her essay is vague. She says: “I’ve finally figured out the difference between neat people and sloppy people.”(255). On the other hand, Barry has two thesis statements: “The primary difference between men and women is that women can see extremely small quantities of dirt.” (261) and “The opposite side of the dirt coin, of course, is a sport” (262).
That organizes his essay and gives him the opportunity to give more information about the difference between men and women, women’s priority, and men’s preferences. Despite their differences, they share allusions as a figure of speech that makes a reference to a place, a person, or something that happened and symbols when they use one object or action to represent or suggest something else. Barry’s first allusion in this essay is the city of Pompeii where the residents all got killed when the local volcano erupted and covered them with a layer of ash. (261). According to his essay, he says the reason that people in Pompeii didn’t leave when ashes started falling was that “it was the custom for the men to do the housework.
They never even noticed the ash until it had for the most covered the children” (262). Another allusion he uses is the story by Edgar Allan Poe when the victim could hear the victim’s heart beating louder, even dead… until he can’t stand it anymore, and he just has to watch the World Series on television (263). Those two stories have to do with making fun of men. Otherwise, Britt compares sloppy people to The New Yorker, they are smart people but neat people are not educated, they don’t care about process. They like the result. What they want to do is watching “Rasslin”. They are not smart at all.
As a symbol, Britt refers to Peter Pan; so, kids who go to Never Land never grow. However, sloppy people never grow up, they are just like children, innocent, immature. Barry, on the other hand, thinks it is healthy to talk about relationship as a game. He says: “Soon all four of us were in there, watching the Annual Fall Classic, while the women prattled away about human relationships or something. It turned out to be an extremely pivotal game” (263). In other words, Barry couldn’t talk about only the game but the game of love. In her essay, Britt talks about sloppy people as a mess. She provides positive sides of sloppy people’s behaviors, and she states the negatives sides of neat people against neat people.
All the examples Britt uses are in contrast to illustrate that neat people are lazier, more wasteful, and meaner than sloppy people. We could say that it’s a part of obsession in life. , he talks about men as a mess by mentioning in his essay that men have never done housework like women and they don’t notice the little details. Barry, when he talks about when he went to a friend’s house with his wife, for an evening of stimulating conversation and jovial companionship, each man couldn’t focus on the various topics the women were talking about, so they found an excuse to leave the room so they could watch the World Series game on television (263).
Due to their essay’s organization, their tone, and especially the allusions and symbols, they both share, we can say that Barry uses simple words to point out everyday circumstances that are really funny and that we can relate to. However, Different views are illustrated by women seeing clean differently than men, and men viewing sports differently than women. To explain it more, men and women are very different in attitudes and opinions. Male and female uniqueness is illustrated with the author’s examples of cleanliness and athletics and entertains us on their behavior toward certain events and occasions. Britt, in her essay, is obviously on the sloppy people side on how she criticizes neat people. She made a contrast between sloppy people and neat people in order to convince the reader that sloppy people are nicer, smarter, educated, and have better morals than neat people. In “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out” and “Neat People vs. Sloppy People”, both essays compare cleanliness in one way or another and both use humor, examples, and points made in their thesis.
Works Cited
- Barry, Dave. “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out” The Bedford Reader. Ed X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy and Jane E. Aaron. 11th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2012. 261- 263. Print.
- Britt, Suzanne. “Neat People vs Sloppy People”. The Bedford Reader. Ed X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy M. Kennedy and Jane E. Aaron. 11th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2012. 255-257. Print.
