SOAPSTone-ing "Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out”

S—

            The subject of Dave Barry’s “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out” is the difference between what women and men are knowledgeable in.  This difference is illustrated through the stories that Dave Barry uses as examples.  For instance, his first story told of the time he tried to “clean the bathroom,” but failed his wife’s standards of cleaning.  He follows this up by talking about how men have more information about sports, “The opposite of the dirt coin, of course, is sports.  This is an area where men tend to feel very sensitive and women tend to be extremely callous.”

O—

            “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out” was written during today’s modern times.  The essay’s time of creation is displayed through the technology that the author talks about in the essay.  For instance, he mentions that a friend is having an event “during a World Series game.”  This is something that was developed earlier.  The probable place of the essay’s creation is the United States because some of the phrases the author uses are phrases only Americans would say.

            The time and place of the essay’s creation influence the essay because they both help define the author’s ideas of men and women more clearly.  Men and women of America tend to have separate activities, such as cleaning for women and watching sports for men.

A—

            Dave Barry’s audience for “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out” is really anyone with a big vocabulary who can understand the subject.  This audience is exhibited through the word choice of the essay; for example, the author says towards the beginning of the essay, “But somewhere during the growth process, a hormonal secretion takes place in women that enables them to see dirt that men cannot see, dirt at the level of molecules, where men don’t generally notice it until it forms clumps large enough to support agriculture.”  That quote shows that you need to understand a few topics before reading the essay, but it has enough humor in it so that middle and high school students could read and understand most, if not all, of this article.

P—

            Barry’s purpose in this essay is to inform about the different activities of men and women.  This is revealed through a couple of sentences throughout the paper: “This is one major historical reason why, to this very day men tend to do extremely little in the way of useful housework,” and, “The opposite of the dirt coin, of course, is sports.”  These quotes list the two discussions of the article: a woman’s ability to do housework and a man’s ability to know sports.

S—

            Barry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, believes that most men cannot do housework.  This value is illustrated when he describes how he would “clean” a bathroom, “I ‘clean’ the bathroom, spraying Windex all over everything.”  He then later mentions how his wife did not even think he had cleaned the bathroom after using the Windex.  This supported the purpose because it informed the reader about how men are not suitable for doing housework.

            Barry, who worked for The Miami Herald, also believes that women don’t know much, if anything, about sports.  As he’s describing the party at a friend’s house—that was on the same day as a World Series game—he says that the women “were behaving as though nothing were wrong.”  His tone becomes impatient, and he describes how the men felt, sitting there, waiting to go watch the big game.  Eventually, the men all go watch it while the women still sit at the table to chat: “Soon all four of us were in there, watching the Annual Fall Classic, while the women prattled away about human relationships or something.  This again shows the difference between genders to the reader.

Tone—

Dave Barry depicts a humorous and witty attitude about the differences between men and women in “Batting Clean-Up and Striking Out.”  These attitudes are expressed with using quotes such as “including the six hundred action figures each sold separately that God forbid Robert should ever take a bath without,” and “such as doing an important project on the Etch-a-Sketch.”  These express the tone by using sarcastic phrases like “God forbid,” or discussing “important projects” on the Etch-a-Sketch—neither of which seem very serious.  The tone serves the purpose of the essay because it gives the reader a funny way of remembering the differences between men and women.  The entire essay is funny and memorable, which allows the information to stick with the reader.