Helpful Instructions For Writing A World History Comparative Essay

A comparative essay will involve looking at two different topics, themes or subjects, and examine how alike or not they might be. It may be that there are major differences, as well as major similarities or, alternatively, there may be subtle similarities and differences, and it will be your job to analyse the two topics in order to find these similarities and differences.

When writing a comparative paper for a subject such as world history, there are a variety of different approaches that you can take in order to write the work. Firstly, you will need to think of a good pair of topics to write about. In order to do this, you may wish to carry out various brainstorming techniques, or perhaps agree think about any recent aspects of the subject that you are studying that you found to be particularly interesting.

Ideally, the two topics that you choose will at least share some common ground, as this will make it far easier to look at various comparisons. Essentially, you may wish to look at various features or characteristics relating to the two topics that you have chosen and, therefore, there needs to be some shared ideas relating to the two topics that you can compare in the first place. Of course, once you carry out any comparisons, you may find that, despite the shared ground, there are still vast differences between the two topics. For example, if comparing two world leaders, the shared ground might be that they both ruled the same country, or during the same era, but some differences may include any conflicting policies or ideologies that they followed.

Structuring your paper

The structure that your essay you will take will be very much influenced by the style of paper that you are writing. For example, if you are writing a five paragraph essay then you will open with a short, one paragraph introduction, and close the essay with a single paragraph conclusion. The middle three paragraphs will then be used as the body section, with each individual paragraph outlining a new point of comparison.

On the other hand, if you’re writing a more in-depth essays then you may include far more details in the body section or, alternatively, it may be that you require additional sections, beyond the simple introduction, body section, and conclusion structure. Ultimately, your essay should follow a similar theme, in that you will use the beginning to introduce the reader to the topic, the middle to outline any comparisons that you wish to make, and the end to refer to any comparisons already made, so as to conclude the piece of writing.