Compare and Contrast

Ambrose Bierce and Washington Irving were both American short story writers, but their writing styles were pretty different. In Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, there is some spooky supernatural stuff going on, but it it viewed in whimsical manner, and by the end of the story, discredited. The story also is not quite believable, and the narrator's tone is personable (as if he were a real person that was there) but rather fantastical, almost as if he doesn't quite believe it himself.
In Bierce's story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, there are no supernatural happenings, but there are serious themes of death. Bierce actually did, however, write many horror stories that pretty much all involve murder and ghosts (don't read them before bed). While Bierce's horror stories and tall tales (yes, he wrote those, too!) are not something that I find believable, they are almost all told as if they are true. His Civil War stories are extremely believable, and told in a way that makes us think they actually happened.  He makes us become emotionally invested in the characters, and in the stories I read, he adds a tragic twist ending. What kind of narrator he uses varies, but, with the exception of his tall tales, the narrator takes the story seriously (unlike the narrator of Sleepy Hollow.) The narrator for  Owl Creek Bridge is very detached, as if he is only there to tell the story, not add his own input. We don't even know where his information came from.
In Owl Creek Bridge,  we have a very serious story about a man facing death, and in Sleepy Hollow we have a humorously spooky story of an ugly schoolteacher. Really, the only similarity I can find between the two writers is that both wrote short stories. Their writing styles are a sharply contrast.