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text’s next section. “We have to have a valid reason for considering these two subjects together. Grant and Lee we can compare because they’re both Civil War generals. Obviously. But we can’t compare Robert E. Lee and Bob Dylan. There’s no basis for comparison.
    â€œAnd once you’ve got your purpose, it’s important to do an outline.” I said it so quickly on the heels of my previous statement that the thought occurred to me: can one interrupt oneself ? “You’ve got to make sure that you’re comparing the same features of both subjects. If you’re comparing your first old clunker of a car to the Lexus you zoom around in now, and you talk about the old junker’s ride, gas mileage, and repairs, then you’ve got to cover the same ground with regard to the Lexus.”
    I drew a chart on the board. “Now, there are two ways to structure this thing. You can talk about all the features of the first subject, then all the features of the second subject. You can spend the first part of the essay on the clunker, and then the second part on the Lexus.”
    First you say how they’re the same, then how they are different. Or you say how they are different first. Or you mix it up a bit. The pedagogues, of course, have to make things complicated. Here’s Professor Shirley Dickson giving us a roundup of the different ways the essay can be organized:
    In the first organizational pattern, named bipolar (Gray & Keech, 1980) or whole-whole (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), the writer describes each topic separately, providing all of the features and details of one topic (e.g., Grasslands Native Americans) in the first set of paragraphs followed by parallel paragraphs about the second topic (e.g., Pacific Northwest Native Americans). The second compare-contrast organizational pattern, integrated (Gray & Keech, 1980) or part-part (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), is a point-by-point comparison of two topics. For example, in a composition of the Grasslands and Pacific Northwest Native Americans, the first, second, and third paragraphs might be about the homes, transportation, and foods of each, respectively. The third organizational pattern, mixed (Raphael & Kirschner, 1985), is a combination of bipolar (whole-whole) and integrated (part-part). Some paragraphs might be only about the Grasslands or Pacific Northwest Native Americans, whereas other paragraphs might be about the similarities and differences in one feature of both, such as religion. 1
    I admire Raphael and Kirschner, who got there early enough to lay claim to the concept of mixed.
    A blanket had descended on the classroom, a blanket of gloom trimmed with a border of indignation. Our textbook spent ten pages on the writing of compare-contrast essays; we had gone through all of it, point by laborious point, and were really none the wiser. The shit I was telling them was too easy; really, it would all be blazingly obvious to a dimwitted second grader. The students had been waiting, pens poised above their notebooks, for some great message from on high, some great secret of writing, and I had nothing, it turned out, to give them. My students were unskilled and unpracticed writers, but they weren’t stupid; they knew what the point of the comparison essay was. The devil is always in the doing.
    My head swam that night as I realized how little help the textbook would offer me. The goals of writing are stark in their simplicity, the methods apparent, the theories nonexistent— none of which makes writing good instructional fodder for textbooks. The doing of it, the adhering to a logical point that’s worth making in the first place, that’s troublesome, and requires a vast landscape of practice.
    Over the years, I have come to think that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the