compare and contrast

The speech "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace and "Morrison Nobel Lecture" by Toni Morrison are similar because no matter what situation its your choice on how you see and handle what happens in your life. In "This is Water" Wallace expresses you have control by saying, "'Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think." You can learn how to think about the positive things in life instead of the negative things and learn the difference between them. In "Morrison Noble Lecture" the old women says, "Weather it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility." It is your responsibility to make the decisions in your life and to have control over it.
   In both speeches it shows how people follow what society is doing, instead of making their own decisions and thoughts about things. 
. ”How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out,” Wallace explains how to separate yourself from societies expectations, and he demonstrates that people stay in their comfort zone instead of experiencing what they would want to do. “She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise,” she is explaining that the languages that aren’t being used in society are dying because people are just thinking like society instead of for themselves.

      The speeches are different because Wallace is explaining that we need to be aware of the meaningful things in life, to not stress over the little things and to live your own life. “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “this is water, this is water.”’ Morrison is explaining that it’s your on outlook on language and how you should take things and our language makes us who we are. “Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life.”