Paper Writing Tips: Categories

Writing Comparative Essays: How to Organize Your Paper?

Writing comparative essays requires choosing the way of organizing your ideas. Students choose different approaches; let’s discuss them in detail.

Writing Comparative Essays: Approach 1

This writing comparative essays approach can be schematically depicted as follows:

Subject 1; Point 1; Point 2.
Subject 2; Point 1; Point 2.

In other words, this approach in writing comparative essays implies that you first discuss a Subject 1 according to several points, and then you discuss a Subject 2 according to the same criteria.

This approach is often used by students, especially by those who are new to writing comparative essays. However, in long essays, it will be difficult for a reader to follow your thoughts. Particularly, when he/she reads about a Subject 2, he/she already forgets what you said about a Subject 1. This writing comparative essays approach is good when you are to write a short essay on a narrow topic.

Writing Comparative Essays: Approach 2

According to this approach, writing comparative essays is fulfilled as follows:

Similarities

Similarity 1; Subject 1; Subject 2...

Differences

Difference 1; Subject 1; Subject 2...

Thus, following to this approach in writing comparative essays, you first discuss all similarities and then describe differences.

This writing comparative essays approach is quite good; however, in some cases, it can make your writing somewhat shallow: it seems that you compare two subjects because your assignment requires you to do a comparison. This approach is good when you are to compare two subjects that are very homogeneous and comparing them is absolutely natural (for example, oranges and apples, cats and dogs).

Writing Comparative Essays: Approach 3

Writing comparative essays can be done as follows:

Criterion 1:

Similarity; Subject 1; Subject 2.
Difference; Subject 1; Subject 2...

This approach in writing comparative essays is good for writing long essays on complicated topics. It helps to explain a reader why two subjects can be compared and demonstrates that you have studied a topic deeply. This approach will work well when you are to compare two theories, two works of literature or art or another complicated issue.