Writing a comparison paper

Your academic career, you'll be asked to write papers in which you compare and contrast two things: two texts, two theories, two historical figures, two scientific processes, and so on. Classic" compare-and-contrast papers, in which you weight a and b equally, may be about two similar things that have crucial differences (two pesticides with different effects on the environment) or two similar things that have crucial differences, yet turn out to have surprising commonalities (two politicians with vastly different world views who voice unexpectedly similar perspectives on sexual harassment). The "lens" (or "keyhole") comparison, in which you weight a less heavily than b, you use a as a lens through which to view b. Lens comparisons are useful for illuminating, critiquing, or challenging the stability of a thing that, before the analysis, seemed perfectly understood. Often, lens comparisons take time into account: earlier texts, events, or historical figures may illuminate later ones, and vice with a daunting list of seemingly unrelated similarities and differences, you may feel confused about how to construct a paper that isn't just a mechanical exercise in which you first state all the features that a and b have in common, and then state all the ways in which a and b are different. Predictably, the thesis of such a paper is usually an assertion that a and b are very similar yet not so similar after all. To write a good compare-and-contrast paper, you must take your raw data—the similarities and differences you've observed—and make them cohere into a meaningful argument. Thus, in a paper comparing how two writers redefine social norms of masculinity, you would be better off quoting a sociologist on the topic of masculinity than spinning out potentially banal-sounding theories of your own.

A paper without such a context would have no angle on the material, no focus or frame for the writer to propose a meaningful s for comparison. Let's say you're writing a paper on global food distribution, and you've chosen to compare apples and oranges. The rationale behind your choice, the grounds for comparison, lets your reader know why your choice is deliberate and meaningful, not random. For instance, in a paper asking how the "discourse of domesticity" has been used in the abortion debate, the grounds for comparison are obvious; the issue has two conflicting sides, pro-choice and pro-life. In a paper comparing the effects of acid rain on two forest sites, your choice of sites is less obvious. A paper focusing on similarly aged forest stands in maine and the catskills will be set up differently from one comparing a new forest stand in the white mountains with an old forest in the same region. As in any argumentative paper, your thesis statement will convey the gist of your argument, which necessarily follows from your frame of reference. In the most common compare-and-contrast paper—one focusing on differences—you can indicate the precise relationship between a and b by using the word "whereas" in your thesis:Whereas camus perceives ideology as secondary to the need to address a specific historical moment of colonialism, fanon perceives a revolutionary ideology as the impetus to reshape algeria's history in a direction toward r your paper focuses primarily on difference or similarity, you need to make the relationship between a and b clear in your thesis.

In fact, your paper will be more interesting if you get to the heart of your argument as quickly as possible. Thus, a paper on two evolutionary theorists' different interpretations of specific archaeological findings might have as few as two or three sentences in the introduction on similarities and at most a paragraph or two to set up the contrast between the theorists' positions. The rest of the paper, whether organized text- by-text or point-by-point, will treat the two theorists' can organize a classic compare-and-contrast paper either text-by-text or point-by-point. But in a "lens" comparison, in which you spend significantly less time on a (the lens) than on b (the focal text), you almost always organize text-by-text. All argumentative papers require you to link each point in the argument back to the thesis. In a compare-and contrast, you also need to make links between a and b in the body of your essay if you want your paper to hold together. To make these links, use transitional expressions of comparison and contrast (similarly, moreover, likewise, on the contrary, conversely, on the other hand) and contrastive vocabulary (in the example below, southerner/northerner). Surrounded by hard times, racial conflict, and limited opportunities, julian, on the other hand, feels repelled by the provincial nature of home, and represents a new southerner, one who sees his native land through a condescending northerner's ght 1998, kerry walk, for the writing center at harvard ght © 2017 the president and fellows of harvard college | accessibility | report copyright account yet?

Categories » education and communications » research and review » articlewikihow to write a comparative parts:developing the essay contentorganizing the contentwriting the essaysample essaycommunity q&s you have been assigned a comparative essay in class, or need to write a comprehensive comparative report for work. Once you have that, then you have to find at least two or three points of comparison and use research, facts, and well-organized paragraphs to impress and captivate your readers. Writing the comparative essay is an important skill that you will use many times throughout your scholastic ping the essay e the question or essay prompt carefully. You may have a great idea for a paper in your head, but if it doesn't perfectly match the prompt, you may not create the product your instructor has asked for. Comparative essay assignments will signal their purpose by using words such as "compare," "contrast," "similarities," and "differences" in the language of the see whether there are any limits placed on your tand the type of comparison essay you are being asked to write. While some essays may be simple compare/contrast essays, others may ask you to begin with that framework and then develop an evaluation or argument based on your comparisons. Assignment will generally ask guiding questions if you are expected to incorporate comparison as part of a larger assignment. This sentence asks you to compare two poets, but it also asks how the poets approach the point of comparison.

Even though you are being asked to write a comparison essay, the inclusion of contrasting material is also implied. This can help you decide on the basis of your may want to develop a system such as highlighting different types of similarities in different example, if you are comparing two novels, you may want to highlight similarities in characters in pink, settings in blue, and themes or messages in ish the basis for your comparison. 5]the comparison needs to have a specific thesis or overarching idea that determines the reason why you are comparing the two (or more) objects. Basis for comparison may have to do with a theme, characteristics, or details about two different things. Basis for comparison may also be known as the “grounds” for comparison or a frame of ch your subjects of comparison. Comparative essay about historical events, social issues, or science-related topics are more likely to require research, while a comparison of two works of literature are less likely to require sure to cite any research data properly according to the discipline in which you are writing (eg, mla, apa, or chicago format). Even if your basis for comparison was assigned to you, you need to express in a single sentence why you are comparing the two items. The comparison should reveal something about the nature of the items or their relationship to each other, and your thesis statement should express that argument.

Advantages of this structure are that it continually keeps the comparison in the mind of the reader and forces you, the writer, to pay equal attention to each side of the method is especially recommended for lengthy essays or complicated subjects where both the writer and reader can easily become lost. Method is by far the most dangerous, as your comparison can become both one-sided and difficult for the reader to method is only recommended for short essays with simplistic subjects that the reader can easily remember as (s)he goes along. Though you may have been taught to sit down and write your paper from start to finish, this is not only harder, but also more likely to make your thoughts disjointed. Only when you've worked with your data will you know what the larger point of the paper sion second. Once you have defined your points of comparison, choose the structure for the body paragraphs (where your comparisons go) that makes the most sense for your data. The last sentence of the essay should leave the reader feeling that all the different threads of the essay have been drawn together in a cohesive aware that your various comparisons won’t necessarily lend themselves to an obvious conclusion, especially because people value things differently. At the end of the introduction, write a thesis statement that first announces which aspects of each subject you plan to compare and then states what conclusion you've drawn from your writing. Although it is tempting to do them at the same time, it is smarter to do them one by one; this ensures you have checked everything and, ultimately, makes the job quicker and more possible, find a friend to look over the essay, as he or she may find problems that you sometimes helps to increase or decrease the font size while editing to change the visual layout of the paper.

With something that draws the reader in, and makes them want to read the paper. General (but depending on the length and topic of the essay), there should be 3-4 points of comparison. More unanswered should be used sparingly and must thoroughly complement the point they are being used to exemplify/ key principle to remember in a comparative paragraph or essay is that you must clarify precisely what you are comparing and keep that comparison alive throughout the title and introduction really catch the reader's attention and make them read the essay. This commonly found conclusion weakens any comparative essay, because it essentially says nothing about the comparison. If you can see a way forward from a problem or dilemma, include that as vague language such as "people," "stuff," "things," believe that an "unbalanced" comparison - that is, when the essay focuses predominantly on one of the two issues, and gives less importance to the other - is weaker, and that writers should strive for 50/50 treatment of the texts or issues being examined. I am writing a comparative essay for self study and didn't know where to start. This article was a great intro to comparative writing and has given me the confidence to start on my essay. Articleshow to write an essayhow to write a ccot essayhow to write a persuasive essayhow to become a freelance text shared under a creative commons d by answer / tips & tools / comparing and ing and this handout is handout will help you first to determine whether a particular assignment is asking for comparison/contrast and then to generate a list of similarities and differences, decide which similarities and differences to focus on, and organize your paper so that it will be clear and effective.

Your career as a student, you’ll encounter many different kinds of writing assignments, each with its own requirements. One of the most common is the comparison/contrast essay, in which you focus on the ways in which certain things or ideas—usually two of them—are similar to (this is the comparison) and/or different from (this is the contrast) one another. By assigning such essays, your instructors are encouraging you to make connections between texts or ideas, engage in critical thinking, and go beyond mere description or summary to generate interesting analysis: when you reflect on similarities and differences, you gain a deeper understanding of the items you are comparing, their relationship to each other, and what is most important about izing comparison/contrast in assignments use words—like compare, contrast, similarities, and differences—that make it easy for you to see that they are asking you to compare and/or contrast. That some topics ask only for comparison, others only for contrast, and others for it’s not always so easy to tell whether an assignment is asking you to include comparison/contrast. And in some cases, comparison/contrast is only part of the essay—you begin by comparing and/or contrasting two or more things and then use what you’ve learned to construct an argument or evaluation. Consider these examples, noticing the language that is used to ask for the comparison/contrast and whether the comparison/contrast is only one part of a larger assignment:Choose a particular idea or theme, such as romantic love, death, or nature, and consider how it is treated in two romantic do the different authors we have studied so far define and describe oppression? May want to check out our handout on understanding assignments for additional comparison/contrast for all kinds of writing mes you may want to use comparison/contrast techniques in your own pre-writing work to get ideas that you can later use for an argument, even if comparison/contrast isn’t an official requirement for the paper you’re writing. For example, if you wanted to argue that frye’s account of oppression is better than both de beauvoir’s and bartky’s, comparing and contrasting the main arguments of those three authors might help you construct your evaluation—even though the topic may not have asked for comparison/contrast and the lists of similarities and differences you generate may not appear anywhere in the final draft of your ering similarities and a venn diagram or a chart can help you quickly and efficiently compare and contrast two or more things or ideas.

Here’s an example, this time using three pizza places:As you generate points of comparison, consider the purpose and content of the assignment and the focus of the class. What do you think the professor wants you to learn by doing this comparison/contrast? These are by no means complete or definitive lists; they’re just here to give you some ideas—you can generate your own questions for these and other types of comparison. Next you must decide which of them are interesting, important, and relevant enough to be included in your paper. For most literature classes, the fact that they both use calson type (a kind of typeface, like the fonts you may use in your writing) is not going to be relevant, nor is the fact that one of them has a few illustrations and the other has none; literature classes are more likely to focus on subjects like characterization, plot, setting, the writer’s style and intentions, language, central themes, and so forth. However, if you were writing a paper for a class on typesetting or on how illustrations are used to enhance novels, the typeface and presence or absence of illustrations might be absolutely critical to include in your final mes a particular point of comparison or contrast might be relevant but not terribly revealing or interesting. For example, if you are writing a paper about wordsworth’s “tintern abbey” and coleridge’s “frost at midnight,” pointing out that they both have nature as a central theme is relevant (comparisons of poetry often talk about themes) but not terribly interesting; your class has probably already had many discussions about the romantic poets’ fondness for nature. Talking about the different ways nature is depicted or the different aspects of nature that are emphasized might be more interesting and show a more sophisticated understanding of the thesis of your comparison/contrast paper is very important: it can help you create a focused argument and give your reader a road map so she/he doesn’t get lost in the sea of points you are about to make.

As in any paper, you will want to replace vague reports of your general topic (for example, “this paper will compare and contrast two pizza places,” or “pepper’s and amante are similar in some ways and different in others,” or “pepper’s and amante are similar in many ways, but they have one major difference”) with something more detailed and specific. Here’s a revision of the thesis mentioned earlier:Pepper’s and amante both offer a greater variety of ingredients than other chapel hill/carrboro pizza places (and than any of the national chains), but the funky, lively atmosphere at pepper’s makes it a better place to give visiting friends and family a taste of local may find our handout constructing thesis statements useful at this zing your are many different ways to organize a comparison/contrast essay. If the paper is short, you might be able to fit all of your points about each item into a single paragraph, but it’s more likely that you’d have several paragraphs per item. Using our pizza place comparison/contrast as an example, after the introduction, you might have a paragraph about the ingredients available at pepper’s, a paragraph about its location, and a paragraph about its ambience. Then you’d have three similar paragraphs about amante, followed by your danger of this subject-by-subject organization is that your paper will simply be a list of points: a certain number of points (in my example, three) about one subject, then a certain number of points about another. This is usually not what college instructors are looking for in a paper—generally they want you to compare or contrast two or more things very directly, rather than just listing the traits the things have and leaving it up to the reader to reflect on how those traits are similar or different and why those similarities or differences matter. Subject-by-subject structure can be a logical choice if you are writing what is sometimes called a “lens” comparison, in which you use one subject or item (which isn’t really your main topic) to better understand another item (which is). It might make sense to give a brief summary of your main ideas about the first poem (this would be your first subject, the “lens”), and then spend most of your paper discussing how those points are similar to or different from your ideas about the than addressing things one subject at a time, you may wish to talk about one point of comparison at a time.

If you have just a little, you might, in a single paragraph, discuss how a certain point of comparison/contrast relates to all the items you are discussing. For example, i might have a whole paragraph about the clientele at pepper’s, followed by a whole paragraph about the clientele at amante; then i would move on and do two more paragraphs discussing my next point of comparison/contrast—like the ingredients available at each are no hard and fast rules about organizing a comparison/contrast paper, of course. If you are writing a comparison/contrast in service of an argument, keep in mind that the last point you make is the one you are leaving your reader with. For example, if i am trying to argue that amante is better than pepper’s, i should end with a contrast that leaves amante sounding good, rather than with a point of comparison that i have to admit makes pepper’s look better. If you’ve decided that the differences between the items you’re comparing/contrasting are most important, you’ll want to end with the differences—and vice versa, if the similarities seem most important to handout on organization can help you write good topic sentences and transitions and make sure that you have a good overall structure in place for your words and other help your reader keep track of where you are in the comparison/contrast, you’ll want to be sure that your transitions and topic sentences are especially strong. The following words may be helpful to you in signaling your intentions:Like, similar to, also, unlike, similarly, in the same way, likewise, again, compared to, in contrast, in like manner, contrasted with, on the contrary, however, although, yet, even though, still, but, nevertheless, conversely, at the same time, regardless, despite, while, on the one hand … on the other example, you might have a topic sentence like one of these:Compared to pepper’s, amante is amante, pepper’s offers fresh garlic as a e their different locations (downtown chapel hill and downtown carrboro), pepper’s and amante are both fairly easy to get additional websites about comparison/contrast :///pages/ work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs 2. May reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout (just click print) and attribute the source: the writing center, university of north carolina at chapel you enjoy using our handouts, we appreciate contributions of g advice home > specific types of writing > the comparative ble pdf is a comparative essay? The assignment may say “compare,” the assumption is that you will consider both the similarities and differences; in other words, you will compare and sure you know the basis for assignment sheet may say exactly what you need to compare, or it may ask you to come up with a basis for comparison ed by the essay question: the essay question may ask that you consider the figure of the gentleman in charles dickens’s great expectations and anne brontë’s the tenant of wildfell hall.

The basis for comparison will be the figure of the ped by you: the question may simply ask that you compare the two novels. If so, you will need to develop a basis for comparison, that is, a theme, concern, or device common to both works from which you can draw similarities and p a list of similarities and you know your basis for comparison, think critically about the similarities and differences between the items you are comparing, and compile a list of example, you might decide that in great expectations, being a true gentleman is not a matter of manners or position but morality, whereas in the tenant of wildfell hall, being a true gentleman is not about luxury and self-indulgence but hard work and list you have generated is not yet your outline for the essay, but it should provide you with enough similarities and differences to construct an initial p a thesis based on the relative weight of similarities and you have listed similarities and differences, decide whether the similarities on the whole outweigh the differences or vice versa. The b block, or second half of your essay, should refer to the a block, or first half, and make clear points of comparison whenever comparisons are relevant. The block method is particularly useful in the following cases:You are unable to find points about a and b that are closely related to each ideas about b build upon or extend your ideas about are comparing three or more subjects as opposed to the traditional g advice home > specific types of writing > the comparative ble pdf is a comparative essay?