Analytical Comparison

Writing Assignment 1 is a comparative essay, comparing two of the articles on the Russian period (numbers 1 through 6, Fisher, Gibson, Black, Rhoda, Dauenhauer, Bolkhovitinov). Your principal task is to find and articulate each author’s major idea or conclusion. So you do not want to report what’s in the article or book, like a book report. Instead, you want to find the kernel of the writer’s conclusion: what did this author most especially want you to understand about his or her subject? That’s the thesis of the article. Then compare the two authors’ theses, and the argument and documentation they used in arriving at their theses. Comparing the two articles on the basis of some sort of commonality will allow you to explain clearly what the authors’ conclusions are. But the main challenge is finding a common theme or idea that unites the two articles. That’s what you’ll organize your essay around.  In this assignment, the most difficult part will be finding a meaningful basis of comparison. Even though two essays may be about different subjects (and learn to distinguish the subject of an essay from the conclusion of the essay; the thesis or point the author wants to you understand is the conclusion he or she makes about the subject), the thesis of the essays may be comparable. For example, Author A might write about the environment, saying Earth doesn’t have enough resources any longer to support the number of people on the planet. Author B might write about the gradual shift among wine makers from cork stoppers in bottles to plastic stoppers or screw-on caps. These are rather different subjects, but the conclusions are comparable. In the first instance, Author A concludes that if we don’t develop new habits of consumption or new technologies, we’re not going to have many of the consumer options we have now, because the materials to make them will be gone. That’s the same conclusion of Author B, though on a smaller scale: because we’ve used up all the cork trees, we have to change our ways and get used to plastic stoppers or screw-on caps on wine bottles. What you need to find is a basis or principle of comparison, a meaningful one, between the two articles you choose to compare. Then you want to compare their theses, the authors’ conclusions. You also want to discuss each author’s argument. You may wish to comment on whether the argument is strong or weak, well reasoned or not, supported by enough evidence and of the right kind, or not. By no means write a descriptive essay, explaining paragraph by paragraph or section by section what the essays say. That’s not what this assignment is. That’s a report. What you are to write is an analytical comparison, following the example and instructions above.