Term Papers and College Research Paper Writing

Somewhere in the recesses of history, an individual or group of individuals determined the form of the perfect essay.  It may or may not have been the English department of some large university, but by the end of the 20th century, the basic structure of the essay had been perfected into its three component parts: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion.  Each one of these parts serves to provide form and function in the communication of clear ideas, and each has a specific role to play that, when fully realized, transform the English language into a powerhouse of logic, argument, and erudition.  (more…)

Writing an essay about two people that look alike teaches the following about writing a contrastive essay: 1] it teaches one to pay attention to logical hierarchies; 2] it teaches one a sense of relevance.

With respect to logical hierarchies, the process of looking closely at two similar people and writing a contrastive essay about their similarities and differences causes one to sharpen one’s sense of the distinction between generalities and specific details.  For example, both of the people one is writing the essay about may have roughly the same body type; they may be mesomorphs, i.e. of a muscular type.  One describes them as such and then, observing them more closely, one perceives and records subtle differences in the way that they are physically structured.

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Essay writing is a very demanding form of expression that imposes a set of tight controls on both one’s writing and one’s thought.  Essays are to thoughts as pocket organizers are to a mass of slips of paper, receipts, jotted notes, phone numbers, bills, credit cards, etc.  One has a host of impressions and thoughts concerning this or that topic; writing an essay forces one to take those impressions and thoughts and put them into a structured, meaningful, logically consistent whole. 

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