I am doing a 1000-1500 word contrast/comparision essay.
This is what I have so far. Could you tell me if this is good enough. This is part of the body.
My neighbours, Sharon and Shelley both have two children each. Sharon has two beautiful girls with long, dark brown wavy hair and Shelley has two energetic boys with dirty blonde shoulder length hair. The girls, Viktoria and Amanda keep busy by spending time with their friends while the boys Blair and Eric lead a more exciting life going to hockey full time and soccer in the summer. Sharons daughters spend most of their precious time around the warm crystal, clear pool and soaking up the hot rays from the sun. Shelleys boys go for a swim every now and then after spending the day dressing into their hockey gear and play road hockey with all those that want to participate. While the sweat quickly falls from the boys faces from running around the hot,dry road, the girls are lathered in oil, lounging in chairs, eating ice cream.
All the kids can play on their front lawns, but the boys, Eric and Blair chose to play hockey on their flat driveway. Sharons driveway is on a 45 degree angle and very hard to do anything but take the sled down it when it's covered in flaky snow providing the girls father Tony has not shovelled it. Tony and Sharon's slanted driveway is attached to a beautiful landscape which is well taken care of but on the other hand, Shelley's driveway is in between her front lawn which needs some drastic work. The landscaping of Sharon's lawn consists of fertilized, green healthy grass with big, accent rocks surrounded by red,brick pebbles and lovely, leaved hostas which look stunning around the big mushroom shaped tree. The brick walkway has some noma lights and no creepy, weeds through the cracks. Then we have Shelley's flower garden, which is one to notice as unsure of which are perennials and weeds until plants come to bloom. The noma lights surrounding flowers are all cracked, broken and half standing. Shelley has lots of scrawny, scraggly trees speratically spread across half of her yellow, patched dead looking grass. Shelley and her boys have very little time to keep up with her yard due to her busy boys needing their sports to lose some of their energy.
Sharon and Shelley may both lead busy lives, it shows on the outside of their homes but Sharon also has a work a holic of a husband that keeps things so exquisite as Shelley's husband does not exist. These two ladies are my friends no matter what their homes look like or how busy they are. We all try to help each other when possible. As both the same to think to have nice yards, they both are different on how the two actually get the work done.
This is all i have so far.. please help. thanks.
Whenever you are writing a comparison/contrast paper (paragraph, essay, research paper), you need to plan it out very carefully on paper first.
Have you done these things in your brainstorming and planning stages?
1. List all the information about one of your topics on one page.
2. List all the information about the other topic on another page.
3. Then put them together in this order:
1. Intro
2. All about topic A
~~~2A. detail 1
~~~2B. detail 2
~~~2C. detail 3
~~~2D. detail 4
~~~2E. detail 5
3. All about topic B
~~~3A. detail 1
~~~3B. detail 2
~~~3C. detail 3
~~~3D. detail 4
~~~3E. detail 5
4. Concl.
The number of details for each topic will vary depending on your main points. I would include comparisons (how they are similar) in the introduction and conclusion, but sections 2 and 3 and all those details will be stating and explaining how they are different.
There are two recognized patterns for writing comparison/contrast papers. One is casually referred to as "zig-zag,” but can be very confusing for the reader if you don’t use transitions effectively; this seems to be the way you are writing this. The other is topic-by-topic (which is what I've outlined above) and is much easier for the reader to follow.
See http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/comparcontrast.html for further help with comparison/contrast writing.