What are the reasons behind all those essays you are writing? Because I bet, every schoolteacher and every college prof regardless of their subjects has given you at least one paper to write. You might think the ultimate goal is a grade, but that’s actually the least of the reasons. If your teachers were only after grades, the test would be a much easier option for them to assess.
The main goal is to teach you to compare and contrast ideas, which is a great and useful skill. You do it every time you choose between two similar products to buy or decide between two books to name as your favorite. Compare/contrast essay topics they give you at school rarely deal with those but they train your brain to assess and compare anything systematically and logically.
How To Come Up With Unique Topics To Compare And Contrast?
It’s simple. You have to take two things, which are somewhat similar, for example, two heroes from one book, two personalities, two historical periods: Classicism and Romanticism, Napoleon and Alexander the Great.
Note that you cannot compare things of different magnitudes or from completely different spheres. For example, you cannot compare a person and a country – that is, you can but it won’t be easy and what would be the point?
To give you a better idea, here is our list of interesting compare and contrast topics to write about. We urge you also to check out the free essay samples that illustrate most of the topics.
Pick A Funny Topic For Compare And Contrast Essay For Younger Students
If you are looking for compare and contrast essay topics for elementary students, your best call would be something a bit absurd and comic. Young kids love to play, have fun and break the routine. However, don’t make the topics too surreal, otherwise, you might confuse them. Here are some good examples:
- Snowboarding vs Skateboarding
- Horror Movies vs Comedy Movies Essay
- Who is Scarier: Vampires or Werewolves?
- Who Would You Like to Be – a Dog or a Cat?
- Time Travel: Future or Past?
- Only Apples or Only Oranges?
- What my Favorite Book Character and My Best Friend Have in Common
- Goldilocks and Snow White: Who Is More Polite?
- My Most Favorite Subject vs. My Least Favorite Subject
- Doing Chores or Doing Homework?
- A Night Without Sleep or A Day Without Food?
- If You Could Make Them Real – Unicorns or Gryphons?
- Would You Prefer Ability to Fly or Endless Supply of You Favorite Treat?
- If You Could Trade One Thing We Have Now With Something People Used To Have In The Past, Which Things Would Those Be?
Find Easy Compare And Contrast Topics For Middle School
In middle school, essays become more systematic. You don’t just compare two things haphazardly, you compare them feature by feature, with a clear topic sentence in each paragraph, creating a hierarchy of most important and least important traits. Topics also become more meaningful. Find your perfect comparison and contrast topic among these examples:
- Beowulf Movie vs Poem
- Life Is Better Now Than 50 Years Ago Essay
- Online Shopping Versus In Store Shopping Essay
- How Plant Life and Animal Life Are Different
- Blue Collar vs White Collar Jobs
- Movie Theater or Streaming Services?
- Typing vs Handwriting
- Shakespeare: Reading vs Watching the Play
- Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
- STEM and Liberal Arts
- Standards of Beauty: Nowadays vs 100 years ago
- Astrology vs Astronomy
- Hitler vs Stalin
- Full-Time Job vs Freelance
Source Good Compare And Contrast Essay Topics For High School Students Here
High-school essays should exhibit deeper analysis and meaningful conclusions. They also require a thorough examination of the facts and materials available on the subject, thus coming closer in the format to a research paper.
Here is our list of ideas for compare and contrast essays of this kind:
- Essays On Islam Religion And Modernity
- The Pros And Cons Of Long Prison Sentences
- What Is The Difference Between Crime And Deviance
- Monopolistic Competition Advantages And Disadvantages
- Online Classes vs Traditional Classes Essay
- Comparing Meursault With Characters In The Stranger
- Punishment vs Rehabilitation Essay
- Nature vs Nurture Essay
- Data Mining Vs Privacy
- Should We Focus on Space Colonization or Earth Exploration?
- Zoroastrianism vs Islam
- Communism vs Socialism
- World War I and World War II
Hunt For Compare And Contrast Essay Topics For College Students
On a college level, comparison essay topics have even more research-paper properties, as students are expected to have a good understanding of the format so that comparing comes easy to them. The entire point of the work is looking for information and eliciting new findings from comparison as just another tool of this research. Topics also get more specific:
- About Vertical vs Horizontal Structure Of An Organization
- Durkheim vs Weber on Theories of Society Essay
- Victoria's Secret vs Fredericks Of Hollywood
- Nature vs. Nurture Debate On Language Acquisition
- MEDLOG vs BMSO
- E-Negotiations Vs Face To Face Negotiation Report
- Inward vs Outward-Oriented Policies
- Chemical vs Mechanical Engineering
- Classical and Neoclassical Theories Of Crime
- Emotional Behavioral And Physical Disability Essay
- Brown vs Board Of Education Research Paper
- Feiner vs. New York
- Great Depression vs Great Recession
How To Use Comparison And Contrast Essay Topics To Write Interesting Essays?
Okay, let’s suppose you’ve chosen your topic for a compare and contrast essay. Yet picking a topic is just the beginning. How do you write an engaging compare/contrast essay?
Browse through our collection of free essays for some examples. When you study a written essay, pay close attention to an introductory paragraph. Usually, it explains the purpose of the comparison.
The purpose is the key to a meaningful and compelling essay. Ideally, you should have a focus of this comparison – an idea you want to prove. For example, if you are comparing apples to oranges, you want to establish which ones are healthier fruit, or which ones should be taken to Mars for cultivation, or which symbolic meaning each fruit have in iconography, etc.
Once you have this purpose, finding features to compare becomes very easy.
Where Else Can You Use Compare And Contrast Essay Ideas?
Topics for compare and contrast essays, apart from their obvious usage as prompts for a paper that yields you a grade and then is forgotten, can be also applied for a variety of purposes. For example, you can compare and contrast subjects in a business presentation, where you put a new product or system against its aging counterpart and highlight the benefits of the new approach. Some topics also make for a good speech, where you let your vivid examples do the talking and only sum it all up in a few words of the conclusion.
As we already mentioned, it’s a useful skill, so you better get down to writing!
