Source A: A life in three hundred words

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

The first draft of the obituary contained three hundred words and not one thing the family disagreed with. I regarded this as an achievement until his daughter read it and said, very gently, that she could not find her father in it.

He had been a ferry engineer. I had written about years of service, practical skill and devotion to his family. All of this was true, she said. It was also the sort of account that could have been prepared before anybody knew which engineer had died.

She told me about the artificial Christmas tree he had refused to replace for twenty-six years. One branch was missing, and he positioned that side towards the wall. His son remembered how much he hated being interrupted while working. His wife remembered that he could not pass a child struggling with a bicycle without stopping. A colleague said he was generous with tools but nearly impossible to persuade that his first solution might be wrong.

I wanted to turn these details into a clean conclusion. A difficult man with a heart of gold, perhaps. The daughter looked at the phrase and shook her head. That would make the difficulties into decoration around the goodness. For some people, his impatience had been more than a colourful habit. For others, his help had changed an ordinary day. Neither memory cancelled the other.

There are obvious responsibilities in writing about someone who cannot answer back. There are also responsibilities towards the people who must recognise a life from different positions around it. A pleasant label can flatten as efficiently as an unkind one. Even praise may become a way of declining to listen.

We kept the service record. We added the tree, a brief memory of a rope repaired on a rain-soaked crossing, and his daughter's sentence about wanting to be helpful more readily than wanting to be corrected. We removed a line in which I had tried to explain what all these things proved.

The finished piece was still three hundred words. It did not contain a whole life, and pretending that it did would have been another mistake. What it offered was a few points at which a stranger might begin imagining a person rather than an example of a virtue.

His daughter thanked me. Then she mentioned something he had once done with a broken umbrella, and we both knew there was no room left. I wrote it in my notebook anyway. The column had ended. The account had not.

Source B: From The Danger of a Single Story — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Read Source B in the official Pearson anthology (printed pages 2–3).

Compare how the writers present their ideas and perspectives about the difficulty of representing a person fully.

Support your answer with detailed examples from both texts, including brief quotations.