You have included many important considerations in this essay, and it is evident that you have engaged with the prompt to guide your analysis. However, the essay lacks a strong thesis that makes a claim about the approaches of the two articles and previews the contents of the paper. Looking to the body of the essay, each of your paragraphs takes on a different consideration, but often these pieces of analysis are lacking concrete reference to the two articles. At times, you speak about the articles, but often there is a lack of specificity and evidence from the text to adequately and clearly support your claims. Lastly, remember that this is a comparative paper, which means that you should likely be applying your criteria to an exploration of both articles.
This is a good start, but significant revision is needed in order for your argument to come through more clearly.
Comparative Text Analysis (Essay 1) (650-800 words)
This comparative paper will help you weigh textual evidence more carefully as you examine the different treatments two writers give the same subject. You will be analyzing two of our assigned texts, “Free Speech is Flunking Out on College Campuses†by Rampell and “Restoring Free Speech on Campus†by Stone and Creely. The purpose of the assignment is to help you perceive distortions in the writers’ use of evidence, assess the reliability of the writers, recognize biases, and draw inferences from the data they present. Allow some of the following questions to guide your analysis:
Dispute over Facts
Disputes about Evidence
Differences in Patterns of Thought
For this essay, you will need to produce a thesis statement which should be underlined. Think of the thesis statement of a one sentence preview of the argument you will make in your essay. Be sure to provide specific detail in the thesis to better forecast the content of the paper.
Additionally, you will want to be sure that each of your body paragraphs begins with a strong topic sentence that identifies the paragraph’s content to the reader. Think of your topic sentence as a mini-thesis. Remember to use the PIE paragraph structure we talked about this week to provide strong claims, specific examples from the text, and then explicit explanation of their significance.