Joseph Mitchell’s writing style is a bit descriptive; as you read along you cant help but feel like he’s very detailed with everything he’s trying to get across to the readers. More so the first version seems like a feature story, and the language is quite different from the second one, but all in all both are feature stories.
I also feel like Mitchell was impressed with Gould on the first reading, whereas in the second reading he was much more critical of him, setting up the reader to be surprised with the end. While we can say that his style is wordy, Mitchell definitely gives us example of how writing can be used to get messages across in a powerful way, with his use of nifty words are different, the spots he uses them in makes it in a way that It could be used today and still possibly work.
In the end I wasn’t really surprised with the truth about the oral history, after all, something that’s longer than the bible is pretty long itself. In addition, to claim that this “oral history” was much more informative than the books that have been passed down history seems really unrealistic; as well as saying it was composed of over 20,000 conversations. The fact though that he did not reveal the truth about the oral history not existing, tells me that he did not due it out of respect for Gould and perhaps because of his own writer’s block.
-Abel Ramirez
