Contrastive Analysis Essay - WRIT 1120 Spring 2013
Name: _____________________________
Peer Review Day: ______________________ Peer Review preparation & participation: 6 pts.
Final Packet Due: ______________________ Staple: final draft, 1st draft, this scoresheet
GOALS
This assignment will give you practice in critical analysis and comparison/contrast, skills which you will use in
writing future research papers.
ASSIGNMENT
You will write an essay using comparison/contrast structure in which you support a thesis by analyzing and contrasting two sources you plan to use for your final research paper. Those sources will have been approved for use in your contrastive analysis essay by me beforehand (see below). For best results, use point-by-point format (three body paragraphs, each focused on an aspect of both sources, discussing each source in the same order in all three paragraphs). Your final draft of this essay should be 4-6 pages.
Merely stating that there are differences and similarities between the sources is NOT an acceptable thesis. The thesis of your Contrastive Analysis Essay will probably be some variation on the following:

"The article by Smith will be more useful to me as support for my final paper than the article by Jones."
You must choose one of the two sources to be superior to the other in some significant respects, and all your essay's
claims will explain ways in which one article is more useful to you than the other as a source.
CHOOSING ARTICLES FOR APPROVAL
You are advised to submit articles from scholarly journals and/or library databases if possible. Do not submit book reviews or articles from general encyclopedias. Avoid short articles (less than 2 pages) or articles found on the WWW. If the article is too long to print, you may print the first 3-4 pages and the last 2-3 pages. Be sure the printout contains all necessary citation information: author name (if provided), article title, name of source, and date. Please also include the URL for web sources. Submit at least two articles, but feel free to submit more.
USING & CITING SOURCES
Use MLA style to cite anything that requires attribution. At least two sources (the sources you are contrasting) should be cited in the bibliography, though you might include more. For example, if you are discussing the authors' respective credibility, you might cite a biography or other source in which an author is discussed. The bibliography for this essay does not require annotations. Remember that final drafts submitted without a bibliography and/or internal citations will receive an automatic score of zero that cannot be made up.
GRADING CRITERIA Earned Possible
I. Appropriate thesis   10
II. Development of claims/supports   22
III. Clarity of prose and organization   7
IV. Correct academic tone   3
V. Correct MLA internal & external citations   8
VI. Mechanics & formatting   6
TOTAL   56