Teaching comparative essay structure

Learn about effective ways to explore similarities and differences to enable a better comparative response. Packing your analysis of two poems into one essay involves planning. There are different ways you could approach writing a comparative essay. These are some points to think about:

Here’s some general advice on how you might structure your comparative essay, but I repeat, adapt, adapt adapt to the question asked. Theme or Issue: Address the Q, introduce your theme, then your texts – genre, name, author and mention the central character who you will focus on in your discussion of this theme.

After students brainstorm similarities and differences for the topic they will be writing their essay over, provide students with a scaffolded rough draft using paragraph frames similar to the ones in the previous section. This helps students stay on topic and helps model what a good compare and contrast essay should look like.

The similarities and differences are unlikely to simply occur to you on the day under exam conditions and the structure of comparing and contrasting, weaving the texts together using linking phrases and illustrating points using key moments is not something you can just DO with no practice. It’s a skill you have to learn.