Compare and contrast John Grisham’s piece to any essay, long-form article on a website like The Atlantic or other news sources, or film/documentary that explores a contemporary social issue that matters to you. Have a debatable, persuasive claim and focus on specific points of comparison, using the Lesson in week 7 to guide your structure.

How to Read and Understand an Expository Essay

The Initial Reading

Read the first paragraph (or section for a longer essay). Then, read the conclusion. Identify what seem to be key concepts introduced in the opening of the essay and those concepts that have been emphasized or that have emerged in the conclusion.
Scan any headings or subheadings for a sense of progression of the development of key points.
With a pen in hand, begin reading the essay from the beginning, marking in your notes or on the printed page the main ideas as you see them appearing.
From your list of main ideas, annotated in the margins of each paragraph and copied to a separate page or note card, try to reconstruct mentally the main ideas of each paragraph.

Identify key passages that you may wish to use as direct quotations, paraphrases, summaries, or allusions in the drafts of an essay.

Subsequent Readings/Reviews
Always begin by reviewing first your notes and note cards on which you have copied the annotations of main ideas from each paragraph.
Turn to the text of the essay only when you fail to remember the exact reference made in the annotations of main ideas.

Identify the Mode of Development

Is the purpose of the essay to inform, persuade, entertain, or to explore?
What is the conclusion of any argument the author may be developing?
As an informational work, is the author’s voice prominent or muted?
Be sure that you understand the writer’s viewp01oint and purpose:
Is the writer trying to explain his or her own opinion? Trying to attack another’s position? Trying to examine two sides of an issue without judgment?
Is the writer being persuasive or just commenting on or describing a unique, funny, or interesting aspect of life and what it ‘says about us’?
As a piece of entertainment, what specific literary humorous devices does the author employ? (See burlesque, hyperbole, understatement, other figures of speech.)
As an exploratory work, what is the focus of the inquiry? What is the author’s relationship to that focus? Is s/he supportive, hostile, indifferent? What?
Analysis of the Author

Explain the author’s attitude toward the subject of the essay. Is s/he sympathetic to the thesis, issue, or key concepts?
Explore on the Internet and/or other electronic or print media any information you can find about the author and the essay. Explain how this external information better helps to understand the essay.
Explain what seems to be the author’s motivation in writing the essay and what s/he hopes to accomplish with the composition.
Identify any other factors in the author’s biography or notes that seem relevant to the purpose of the composition.

Some Major Essayists

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
St. John de Crevecœur (1725–1813)
Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
James Madison (1751–1836)
Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850)
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Frederick Douglass (1817?–1895)
Herman Melville (1819–1891
James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
Mark Twain (1835–1910)
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
H. L. Menken (1880–1956)
E. B. White (1899– )
Ralph Ellison (1913–1994)
Louis Auchincloss (1917– )
Betty Friedan (1921– )
James Baldwin (1924–1987)
William F. Buckley Jr. (1925– )
Gore Vidal (1925– )
Edward Abbey (1927–1989)
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968)
John McPhee (1931– )
Joan Didion (1934– )
Garry Wills (1934– )
Jonathan Kozol (1936– )
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941– )
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002)
George F. Will (1941– )
Garrison Keillor (1942– )
Annie Dillard (1945– )
Dave Barry (1947– )
Katha Pollitt (1949– )
Bill Bryson (1951– )
Brent Staples (1951– )
Deborah Tannen (1951– )
Anna Quindlen (1952– )
Cornel West (1953– )
David Sedaris (1956– )
Malcolm Gladwell (1963– )

Reading and Writing about Poetry

Like novels, poems can be analyzed as singular events, or they can be compared/contrasted in a broader conversation. You might look at multiple works from the same author, works featuring the same themes, works with the same image pattern, or works in the same genre (lyrics, elegies, etc.) There are lots of options. When asked to analyze poetry try to think of a persuasive thesis ( an opinion), then brainstorm at least three forms of evidence to help you construct the body paragraphs. When writing a compare/contrast, you want to think of your three forms of ‘evidence’ instead as your ‘three points of comparison’.

A poetry analysis, then, might have thesis statement like this:

Although “Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford uses the same situation as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it presents a view of humanity and nature that is far more bleak.

I would then construct the body of the paper to explore and discuss the ways in which the two poems differ.

I could have said:

“Traveling Through the Dark” by William Stafford uses imagery of birth and death to imagine a world in which human beings are like the cruel gods of Greek mythology, deciding the fate of others arbitrarily.

The evidence I choose to support my opinion helps me to structure my piece, no matter what the evidence is.

Compare and Contrast Writing

If I’m comparing/contrasting, I might think of two subjects and then three ways to compare/contrast them, my “points of comparison.”

I would then, most likely, structure the body of my paper like this:

Intro with thesis

1st body paragraph: Setting: discuss both poems and how they treat the physical setting of the poem.

2nd body paragraph: Imagery: discuss the particular images employed in each poem.

3rd body paragraph: Theme: discuss how the first two elements create a thematic statement in each poem.

Then I would conclude.

This is called a point-by-point arrangement and can be applied to any compare and contrast assignment, whether you are examining movies, poems, generals, disease treatment protocols, presidents, graduate schools, etc.