Compare and Contrast
Mike Rose
During one class they may be comparing texts, a couple descriptions, let's say of geophysical phenomenon, OK? And then in another time they're comparing a couple poems. And then in another time they're comparing a couple theories about social behavior from psychology or social psychology. The more that they try out these thinking/writing strategies, with more and different kinds of disciplinary material, that is they're actually trying the strategies out in real honest-to-God academic contexts, I think they get more proficient at using these thinking/writing strategies in ways that they feel comfortable with. They're able to leave that writing classroom and move into the world of the lower division curriculum.

Kuulei Rodgers
In the main body of the paper, when we discuss, in our discussion section…we often will compare work that other scientists have done that is comparable to what we have done in our field. So if I'm working on growth rates, for example, here in Kane'ohe, I may wanna look what the growth rates are like in Tahiti or the Marcasis, or other areas; are they comparable? So that people have a wider knowledge of what these numbers really mean.

Often we have a lot of library research. We read journals upon journals and a lot of articles and papers and then we have to pick out what's relevant to our project. And those are the things we'll use to compare and contrast various points.

Teresa Redd
My students still need to learn how to compare and contrast systematically, keeping everything parallel, right? Using criteria, carefully, and that dovetails beautifully with the problem-solving strategy in their introduction to engineering design course because they have design projects where they're given information about a particular problem, say, how to design a bathtub for the elderly. And unfortunately in many of our comp texts and our comp courses we're so divorced from content and the purpose of these strategies that the strategies just seem like formulas to students. "Oh, well I'm gonna write a comparison/contrast essay, I'm supposed to do this, this, and that" and the student doesn't realize, hey, this is a way to make decisions in a logical way and to be able to justify them.

Chitra Divakaruni
So when I teach comparison/contrast I give my students, I offer my students the two major modes of comparison/contrast organization, where you have two topics, let's say just for example, maybe, ideas about marriage in the Indian community versus ideas of marriage in the mainstream American community. And I tell them that you can deal with topic A all at once and you would then select angles or aspects of topic A, deal with that, that will be the first half of your paper. You have a transition, you move on to topic B, mainstream American society. You go back to each of those aspects. And that's how you make that connection. Or, we outline a whole different way, which is the either/or kind of structure where the focus is now on the particular aspect or point we're dealing with for example, divorce. And then we look at both communities and we give examples of both communities. That forms a little unit in the essay, we have a transition, and we go on to the unit. So I like to give students lots of different outlining techniques as we move onto rhetorical modes.

Michael Bertsch
A compare and contrast paper has to have a controlling idea: Why are we comparing these two things? For example, "Grant and Lee: A study in contrast." An essay used quite frequently. Why are we comparing these two men? Well heck, they were both Civil War generals. But other times comparisons are strained when the reader knows you're comparing two things for some other purpose that is not yet understood then the reader loses interest in that section of the paper. So if you're writing an argument and are trying to advance your point by making two comparisons which at the first reading are sort of far-fetched or further afield from the controlling idea, then the reader loses interest. And when the reader loses interest you can't persuade them to do much anything except put the paper down. There are some compare and contrast papers, which will be an argument paper. In other words, comparing recycling and not recycling. There's a clear point to that: the landfill fills up much more quickly if no one recycles. That compare and contrast is obvious and that's an argument paper.

Donald Pharr
I like business examples, workplace examples. If I'm working for my boss Bob, and I'm sitting in my Dilbert-like cubicle, Bob comes by and says, "We've narrowed our search for a new company car down to two, the Buick and the Toyota. I got all this information. Here, write me a report and let's try to come to a decision here." What kind of mode am I going to use? I'm going to use comparison/contrast. Do I have a choice? No. Did he assign me a comparison/contrast mode? No. He gave me a set of information that gave me no choice. In other words, my feeling about the modes is they weren't invented by English teachers, they weren't invented by people in the academy of any stripe. They were derived or developed from the needs of communication.