Comparison essay writing guide: main tips and recommendations

Students may be assigned various kinds of written tasks in the course of their school life. An essay is probably the easiest of them, still there are the peculiarities of their own. And when it comes to different types of this kind of an assignment it gets even more difficult. You need to know all the finest points of a debate essay, a persuasive essay, a cause and effect essay, a comparison essay or any other kind and type of this assignment.

In this article we’ll try to explain the essence of the latter and give you the main tips on writing it so you can cope with the assignment on your own with no problems saving your time, efforts and money.

So, to start with, a comparison essay presupposes that the author should compare and contrast two objects. This means that in your writing you are to consider and describe these notions, all their advantages, disadvantages, similarities and differences. For this purpose you are to explore and investigate them both thoroughly and describe your findings in the essay. Generally, there are two different ways to arrange this sort of an assignment and we are going to discuss it further.

The first way of arrangement is a separate description of the two notions in turn. For example you present one notion at first and describe it explaining all its qualities, advantages, disadvantages, etc. Next you present the second notion giving its full description and explanation. In the conclusion you are to compare what have been said above.

The second way of arrangement is successive comparison of them both. Here the number of paragraphs will depend on the number of similarities or differences of these notions. So in this kind of arrangement you will successively discuss each similarity or difference of the two chosen notions in each separate paragraph.

In any of the two cases remember that the exposition is to flow smoothly. Don’t mix everything up. Don’t skip from one point to another and then back. Try to link the paragraphs together with the help of linking words and sentences and to sound naturally. Select only the most significant qualities to compare not to overload the writing with thousands of petty details making it too long and boring to read. Another advice is choosing the related notions for your comparison essay. Don’t try to compare things that have nothing to do with each other, like a chicken and a hamburger.