Essay

WTO Comparative Commentary

The two Internet articles, the World Trade Organization's Building Trade Capacity (Text A) and War on Want's Trade and the WTO both discuss the WTO's involvement in developing countries´ economic activities. However, they show opposite views on this issue. As such, even though both texts are divided into three sections, their use of stylistic devices is contrastingly different. Text A uses an informative tone, concrete diction, scarce imagery, and hyperlinks to fulfill its purpose of describing the WTO's efforts to build trade capacity and conclude that building trade capacity leads to economic growth. Text B makes use of melancholic, aggressive and assertive tones, emotional language, vivid imagery and quotes from experts to convince readers that the WTO's free trade model is actually hurting underdeveloped countries.

The purpose of text A is explicitly shown explicitly at the beginning of the article by stating that "This page describes the efforts made by WTO to meet their special needs by building ´trade capacity´ to enable them to trade more effectively." From the content of the text, its descriptions on how the WTO is helping countries progress through building trade capacity, the theme can be inferred to be that building trade capacity leads to economic growth. The text's informative nature makes it suitable for general audiences.
Contrastingly, text B does not explicitly state its purpose, though it is easily discernible from the very beginning in the sentence "The WTO’s 'free trade' model poses a deadly threat to poor communities in developing countries": to convince readers that the WTO is actually hurting developing countries. Through this, the text's theme can be deduced to be that free trade expands poverty in underdeveloped countries. Also, unlike text A, this article emphasizes on the UK: phrases such as "The UK is working hard with its EU partners…" and "In the UK, War on Want is an active member of the Trade...