Writing Tips

Writing Effective Comparative Essays

Using both Comparison and Contrast

General Guidelines on the Style of your Essay, or “How to Write a Comparative Analysis”:[1]

If you pursue a tertiary education, you'll be asked many times to write essays 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 essays, 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).

Faced with a daunting list of seemingly unrelated similarities and differences, you may feel confused about how to construct an essay 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 an essay is usually an assertion that A and B are very similar yet not so similar after all. To write a good compare-and-contrast essay, you must take your raw data – the similarities and differences you've observed – and make them cohere into a meaningful argument. Here are the five elements required.

Frame of Reference. This is the context within which you place the two texts you plan to compare and contrast; it is the umbrella under which you have grouped them. The frame of reference may consist of an idea, theme, question, problem, or theory; a group of similar things from which you extract two for special attention; biographical or historical information. The best frames of reference are constructed from specific sources rather than your own thoughts or observations. Thus, in an essay comparing how two writers explore the social effects of war, you...