Order 888223: Comparative Analysis

Formal Essay One, Comparative Analysis English 1102, Spring 2018, Foland

Rough draft Due: March 14

Final Draft Due: March 16

Your first formal essay calls for you to examine two texts very closely to determine each author’s techniques and degree of adherence to generic conventions. You will explore several of each text’s features and arrive at a (soft) thesis of comparative judgment as your response, which should be a statement on the texts’ relative methods and/or merits. This project requires you to apply a balanced, in-depth observation of many parts of a text, including its language, structure, and images, if applicable. Be willing to examine all aspects of the text, negative and positive. For this essay, you should pick two “news” stories on any topic of interest; you may then continue with pursuing this topic for the remainder of the semester.

Your goal is to become a better consumer of information and to learn more about communication efforts that are not overtly persuasive (but perhaps alter opinions anyway). You should clearly identify the parts of each article that you feel contribute importantly to the comparison of the pieces. Ask questions about each text that you want answers for, and let those questions lead to your findings and interpretations. You will want to focus on the exact wording, arrangement, and publishing arenas for each piece. You are looking into the strategies that the authors employ to compose their pieces, as well as their effectiveness and generic complicity. You also need to provide evidence from the texts for all of your assertive statements.

Additionally for this project, you must consider the texts’ target readers and how the author attempts to establish credibility with the intended audience. There should be no appeals to emotion or logic, but call them out as you see them as well as any areas of logical inconsistency. Please always report information from any source text accurately and objectively, being sure to include description and context about the stories under consideration as well as giving attribution to sources’ named authors (or providers) within your essay. In MLA style, we use PRESENT tense verbs to tell what authors say or what any text does, so use present tense signal phrases.

Your essay’s formatting should follow typical academic conventions: type your essay in 12-point font and double-space it. Use the MLA left justified heading at the top with your name, my name, course title, and date. Give a title to your essay, centered above your body text with no special formatting. You will decide how much to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from each source, but you must give proper in-text citations as well as a Works Cited entry for each source—technically, these entries should be on a separate page, but if they fit at end of your essay, do not waste another sheet of paper to create the Works Cited.

This essay is worth 17.5% of your course grade (or 175 points) and should be four pages or so in typed length (without the Works Cited list). Each paper will be assessed along the above criteria and should somewhere include brief summaries (or descriptions) of the texts you are analyzing and the full name of author and title of each, if applicable. You should also provide publishing context for each story; you may need to do light research into those publications or find out more about specific genre conventions as well. We will study comparative structuring options, and you may wish to outline your main points before composing this essay.

The final draft is due in class on Friday, March 16. You should also upload the file to the appropriate spot in our “Assignments – Turn In” area of Blackboard when finished.