Prompt:
For this essay, compare and contrast “Fish Stories” with “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” Specifically, I want you to focus on the way that each story expresses a slightly different theme about the same topic. To unify your essay write about:
- Child-parent relationships
Requirements:
- Unify your essay with a thesis (preferably the last sentence of your introduction) that expresses your main point for your essay. That is, make a claim identifying a central similarity and difference in the themes of the stories.
- Include an introduction, several body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Paragraphs should be about 5-10 sentences.
- Organize your essay with topic sentences that express your main points for your paragraphs and that transition from your previous paragraph.
- Incorporate quotes from the story (include, on average, 2 quotes per paragraph). Introduce, explain, analyze, and weave in these quotes. Analyzing these quotes should help you support your topic sentence and thus your thesis.
- Write about the story in present tense.
- Use point-by-point organization (switch back and forth between each story) or block method (write about one story for the first half and the other story for the second half), but spend roughly the same amount of words on each story.
- Include in-text citations and a Works Cited page with an MLA entry for your story. Please see chapter 24 of your textbook for information about MLA.
- Avoid summarizing the story.
Example
For an example of a student’s comparison essay about literature, please see Charles Collins’ essay on pages 178-181 in your textbook. Please note that this essays respond to significantly different prompts from my essay prompt, so you wouldn’t want to replicate Collins’ approach exactly. For more on how to write a compare/contrast essay, please see chapter 22.2.1 in your Norton textbook.