Over the last few years (I’ve now been a part-time English student for three years, more-or-less), I have had to “Compare and contrast” an awful lot. Compare these two books. Contrast these two authors. Compare and contrast these two poems.
So much comparing! So much contrasting!
My final exam for this course is, unsurprisingly, an essay about comparing and contrasting. And that’s fine, I don’t mind doing that one more time (this semester). My least favourite part of essays are always the Works Cited requirements. Having to find a particular passage or quotation from a book I read once is a slog… especially if I need multiple relevant quotations. And I don’t think there’s a good way to work around that… if you find the quotations first, you have to adjust the content of the essay to the quotes, but if you write the essay first it can be impossible to find appropriate quotations (especially if you, like me, don’t precisely remember what you’ve read, just approximations!). Oh well. My essays tend to be graded very favourably, so I can’t complain!
I should get to it. It’s a slog, but it’s an important one, and it needs time to be edited and adjusted as I write.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!