English 1100 (A20) – Instructions for Comparative Essay
Length: ~5 pages, typed, double-spaced (approximately 1200-1500 words)
Comparative Essay due: August 3, 2021 (**rough draft due for peer editing July 27**)
Choose ONE of the following questions and write a comparative essay, making sure that you develop a clear thesis and use details and quotations from the text to support your arguments. Make sure your quotations are apt and pertinent. Do not waste a lot of space on a long, generalized introduction, but get straight to your point and then concentrate on staying on track, providing clear transitions and avoiding vagueness.
**Important note*: the two texts that you choose to write on cannot be texts that you have written on in previous papers.**
1. Many of the texts we’ve read this semester are concerned with how memory engages with past events and experiences. Choose two texts from our reading list and compare and contrast how they construct and make use of the relation between the past and the present. What are the strengths and limitations of memory as figured in the texts you select?
Essays to consider might include Orwell, Sanders, Gawande, White, Walker.
2. How does the audience for which a particular essay is written influence things like its form, diction, style, and the way the argument is presented? Select two texts we’ve read this term; identify the audience for each and discuss how a writer’s awareness of an audience (or audiences) appears to influence the way each essay is written.
3. Many of the texts we have read focus on the relationship between the individual and the community, though in quite distinct ways. Construct an essay that examines the ways in which any two writers on our reading list represent the relationship between self and community.
Essays to consider might include Gawande, Pollan, Orwell, Eighner, Franklin, Walker.
4. We have read a wide selection personal essays (including those by Eighner, Franklin, Sanders, White, Walker), as well as argumentative essays involving science, philosophy, and ethics (like Gould and Singer). Some essays (such as those by Pollan, Carr, and Gawande) straddle the line between the personal and the argumentative. Construct an essay that considers the different strategies employed by any two writers on our reading list. If we can assume that these writers want their readers to feel a specific emotion, or reflect on a particular topic, or to be convinced of a certain argument, what are the strategies that these writers use to accomplish these goals, and how do these strategies differ?
REMEMBER the 3 major elements I’m considering in evaluating your paper:
Analysis: How well do you understand the content and/or structure of the text? Demonstrate that you’ve thought about the text, that you have an understanding of how the important pieces of the text are put together.
Structure: How effectively do you put your essay together? Does your essay have a clear and consistent focus?
Grammar: Sentence structure, spelling, punctuation.
REMEMBER the 3 essential things that an essay must have:
Thesis: A central, unifying argument. Your thesis must be consistent, and it cannot be self-evident (or obvious).
Organization: Putting your ideas together in a logical way.
Evidence: Where are you getting your ideas and arguments from? Do you provide textual evidence to support your claims?
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