Writing a Contrastive Essay – Practice Makes Perfect
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.
There is a logical hierarchy at work in the contrastive essay. Both belong to the class of mesopmorphs, but they vary in terms of specific details. I submit that one of the cardinal virtues of good expository writing is that the distinction between the general and the specific is well observed. Comparing and contrasting two similar people is a good way of learning to attend to that distinction. And it not only makes one write better, it also sharpens and focuses one’s observational skills.
Writing an essay about two people who are of similar appearance also helps to enhance one’s sense of relevance. Any comparison between one thing and another of a like type, be it mountains, pieces of music, or the appearance of two human beings must involve the selection of certain facts. For the comparison to be relevant, the fact selected from the first object must be comparable, that is, like in nature, to the fact selected from the second object. In a comparison of two people of similar appearance, this is fairly easy to do in terms of specifics, the nose, ears, and hair color of the first automatically match up with the nose, ears, and hair color of the second. It is thus a kind of beginner’s exercise in matching like with like, a way of beginning to develop a sense for comparability, and with it, a sense of relevance.
No related posts.
Recent Comments