Messages from the past

Text A: an original contemporary personal-article-style practice extract.

Every few months, my phone announces that its storage is nearly full. I remove blurred photographs and forgotten downloads without hesitation, but messages are different. A voice note from my aunt contains a story I have heard many times. It also contains her laugh, the clatter of cups and someone calling from the next room. Deleting it would not erase the afternoon, but keeping it makes that afternoon easier to reach.

I do not preserve every conversation. Arrangements about meeting times have served their purpose, and a long discussion about which film to watch deserves no permanent home. However, some messages record how people spoke when they were excited, worried or trying to be kind. Written words can hold details that memory quietly edits.

My saved messages form a small, untidy archive. They are not all important, but importance is not always obvious when a message first arrives. Storage space can be managed. A familiar voice cannot be recorded again in exactly the same moment.

Text B: an original contemporary personal-article-style practice extract.

I once kept every message because I imagined that each one might become useful. Soon, finding anything important meant pushing through months of reminders, repeated jokes and discussions about plans that had already changed. When I missed the new time for a rehearsal because it was buried beneath dozens of replies, my careful record began to look less like organisation and more like neglect.

Now I review old conversations regularly. I save addresses, decisions and the occasional message that genuinely matters to me. The rest can go. Deleting a request to buy milk does not destroy a friendship, and removing twenty versions of the same joke does not make the joke less funny.

Keeping everything asks the past to compete constantly with the present. My phone is no longer a cupboard packed so tightly that nothing can be found. It contains fewer messages, but I notice the ones that remain. Deleting the unnecessary is not the same as forgetting; sometimes it is how we decide what deserves attention.

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about keeping old messages. Support your comparisons with detailed references to both texts.

In your answer, you should compare:

• what each writer values or criticises
• how language and structure are used to present their perspectives.