¶ … lobster festival in Maine for Gourmet magazine and another comments on the human tendency toward materialism, both James Twitchell and David Foster Wallace share an appreciation for the written word. Their writing styles are engaging, using colloquial and familiar language to explore meatier topics. A use of naturalistic language prevents Twitchell's "Two Cheers for Materialism" from falling into the trap of making scholarly writing inaccessible to the masses, and likewise prevents Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" from being as trite and trivial as most articles written for mainstream magazines. The similarities between these two articles are remarkable considering their different subject matters and themes. In terms of both tone and style, Wallace and Twitchell use just enough sarcasm to keep the reader interested, but neither permits their wit to be weighted down by cynicism. Both authors use neologisms judiciously, as when Wallace coins the term "yachty" to refer to Camden, Maine, and when Twitchell talks about "mallcondo" culture. In both cases, it is impossible to imagine better terms for these words, which is why the option of neologism remains open. Twitchell and Wallace use real words when they can, but when real words cannot quite capture the essence of what they are trying to say, their made-up words make the concepts sound a lot more interesting. Both authors use long sentences liberally, but neither allows those long sentences to become cumbersome or grammatically irksome....

The authors' sense of pacing is immaculate, as short sentences break up the long ones. As part of their commitment to keeping their language use fresh, Wallace and Twitchell embrace words like "stuff." For example, Wallace writes, "And it's true that they are garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff, although they'll also eat some live shellfish, certain kinds of injured fish, and sometimes each other," (1). Twitchell writes, "Americans spend more time tooling around the mallcondo -- three to four times as many hours as our European counterparts -- and we have more stuff to show for it." In both sentences, the tone is straightforward and tinged with playful sarcasm.
Both Wallace and Twitchell use their primary subject as a launching pad for talking about deeper matters. This is truer for Wallace than for Twitchell. For example, Twitchell remains on point discussing the nature of materialism in America. During the discussion, however, the author introduces readers to the history and evolution of ideas surrounding materialism. The reader is taken on a journey starting roughly with the Protestant Revolution, through Marxism, up until the 20th century. Mallcondo culture is the springboard from which to explore ethical, social, and political repercussions of materialism. By talking about mallcondo in a humorous way, Twitchell avoids sounding pedantic as that would not be his natural style Likewise for Wallace, his discussion of the evolutionary biology of the lobster and its role…