What follows is a silly attempt to explain what constitutes a comparative essay or what my K-12 teachers used to call a “compare-and-contrast” essay. I assign a fair number of these in my classes, and I wanted to have an example to show students what such an essay might look like.

In colloquial English, it is common to liken comparing two different objects to comparing apples and oranges. This a curious expression because the two share three common characteristics. First, apples and oranges are not only food, both are tree fruits. Second, along with the banana, they are among the most common fruits consumed in the United States. You can almost certainly find them packed in a lot of schoolchildren’s lunch boxes, if contemporary parents still pack a lunch for their children. Third, the two fruits are about the same size, which might be why they are so commonly eaten: on school lunch trays, in the brown-paper bags of blue-collar tradesman, and on the desk of a white-collar worker.

In this essay, I will compare apples to oranges to determine what specific differences exist between apples and oranges. I will use five criteria to evaluate their differences: their color, their shape, the edibility of their skins, their taste, and the different climates in which they are mass produced and harvested.

Color

First, the color of each fruit is significantly different. An orange bears the name of its color: orange. After evaluating many different oranges in a variety of locations, oranges appear to come in just one color. In fact, the richness or the paleness of that orange is often a visual signifier for its freshness, its juiciness, and its sweetness—qualities that are reasonably subjective and relative to the eater’s taste.

Apples, on the other hand, can come in at least two colors: red and green. Within each color, there are some variations, indicating the different varietals of apples that are available at most grocery stores and at farmers markets in regions, such as New York, where apples grow aplenty. However, despite all these varieties, there are no apples that appear orange, and no orange appears in red or green colors. The skin color alone is a determining signifier of whether an apple is an apple and whether an orange is an orange.

Shape

Second, the shape of the fruits are also different despite being reductively described as round. First, oranges are almost perfect spheres. They are commonly packaged and displayed at stores in a fashion where orange fits in the crevice between the other oranges, as illustrated below. This allows one to evaluate the orange by a glance.

This is usually only possible with perfectly round objects, such as tennis balls.

Apples, on the other hand, do not have this exact same shape. While they are mostly round, their differing shape makes it difficult to evaluate in this fashion. You can see the bottom, the stem, or the body of the fruit, but picking one requires picking it up to evaluate the color, firmness, and whether it has suffered bruising.

Edibility of the Skin

Third, the skins of each fruit are also different. The apple skin is very commonly eaten, except perhaps by some picky schoolchildren who had a parent peel their apples before packing them in a lunch box. According to a study by Kelly Wolfe and Rui Hai Liu, a food scientist at Cornell University, an apple skin contains a lot of important nutrients that provide multiple health benefits, which one does not get from eating a peeled apple.¹

An orange peel however is largely inedible. It is tough in texture and bitter in flavor. Not only that, the only sources that seem to recommend eating orange peels are a few online quack doctors with questionable credentials and motives. For example, Dr. Mercola advocates eating orange peels because, he says, the peels “may prevent histamine release,” “cleanse your lungs,” and “improve oral health.” However, let’s not forget that he has drawn a lot of controversy for advocating medical practices that fly in the face of conventionally acceptable practices and may harm public health, such as criticizing vaccines.

Taste

Fourth, the taste of these two fruits are considerably different. While taste is largely subjective, an apple is noticeably sweeter than an orange. An apple has a prominent sweet taste with a sour aftertaste. An orange, on the other hand, has a mostly sour taste although one certainly savor its sweetness along with that bitterness.

One way to evaluate each fruits sweetness-versus-bitterness is to examine their use in pie recipes. I compared two pie recipes at the Taste of Home website, and you can see how apples largely provide their own sweetness in this apple pie recipe:

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 6 to 7 cups thinly sliced peeled tart apples
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• Pastry for double-crust pie (9 inches)
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 large egg white
• Additional sugar

The sweetness of the pie comes from the added sugar, but mostly from the natural sweetness of the apples.



However, the orange pie recipe in this popular website recommends making a frosted orange pie with not only more added sugar but also adding frosting to offset the bitterness that inhere in most oranges.

Climate

Finally, the climate where each fruit is grown can vary significantly. In the United States, apples are mostly grown and exported from two states: New York and Washington, two states with relatively cool climates. Apples also peak in the autumn and are usually harvested in the months between August and November.

Oranges, on the other hand, are grown in warmer climates, and the two US states best known for growing and exporting apples are California and Florida. The harvest period is also a bit later than it is for apples. Oranges are harvested in the winter months after the apple harvest has concluded.

Conclusion

In conclusion, apples and oranges, among the most commonly eaten fruits in the United States, share many similarities but as I’ve compared above, they also bear many specific differences that make them assuredly different. It’s no wonder, then, that we have that aphorism about apples and oranges. In recent months, the cable news network CNN has run a series of ads as part of its “This is an apple” campaign. The ad takes aim at President Trump’s attempts to discredit the press as “FAKE NEWS” when it criticizes him and his policies:

This is an apple. Some people might try and tell you that it’s a banana the ad. They might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again. They might put BANANA in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it’s not. This is an apple.

The ad plays on the common sensibility of most (but sadly, not all) that there’s a difference between an apple and a banana, much like we now assuredly know there are at least five differences between an apple and an orange.

It’s the time of the semester when teachers everywhere will start receiving a batch of papers to grade. For years, as I mark each paper, I dream about composing a concise guide about common problems with undergraduate writing.

With some spare time today, I made that dream come true. I posted to my professional site a guide to quoting, paraphrasing, and citing sources.

In addition to linking to it here, I’m also reproducing it for some SEO gamesmanship.

When to Quote

You should quote sparingly in your paper as it could rob you of your voice.

At one extreme, a really poor paper will have blockquote after blockquote. I get it: quotes take up space and help reach your word count, and it makes it appear that you’ve engaged with the reading. But all those blockquotes demonstrate a poor grasp of your own argument. If you’re going to quote so much, I may as well read the source of quotes rather than your paper.

The best papers will quote only when the passage in the source is so unique, so valuable, and so succinct, that it cannot be said any other way. Abraham Lincoln could have opened his famous address with “In 1776, we signed the Declaration of Independence. This document listed a number of grievances against the British crown. Those grievances included….” But since he started with “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and those words were and remain so powerful, you should quote him.

The same is true for short phrases. You don’t have to quote an entire sentence or paragraph. Sometimes it might be enough to just quote a few choice words that you can wrap in your own prose.

While President of the United States, Bill Clinton resisted the elimination of affirmative action for college admissions, famously saying “mend it, don’t end it.”

If you want to include something that you extracted from a source, please just paraphrase it in your own voice. There are two benefits to this. First, you can condense or expand the passage you found in someone else’s work as you see fit. It might even help you reach that word count. Second, your paper remains in your voice.

Regardless if you quote directly or paraphrase, you must cite the source in your text. Here’s how.

Simple In-Text Citations

Citing a source could be easy as just adding a couple of parentheses, an author’s name, and a page number. When paraphrasing a work by Liz Collinson, my citation would come after the passage I wrote.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit donec a diam lectus. Sed sit amet ipsum mauris (Collinson 11).

Another option is to name the author in your prose, allowing you to omit it from the parenthetical citation.

According to Liz Collinson, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit donec a diam lectus. Sed sit amet ipsum mauris (11).

If you want to quote, the process is largely unchanged. However, to keep the prose in your own voice, you should never start a sentence with a quote.

When describing lorem ipsum, Liz Collinson notes, “Donec et mollis dolor” (11).

Note that in each example above, the trailing period always comes after the citation. Always.

Simple Reference List

All those citations are meaningless because I have no idea who Liz Collinson is or what she wrote. I need help finding the source you referenced. That’s where a reference list comes in.

For a printed work, such as a book, you just need to include:

• author’s name (last name, first)
• the title of the book
• the place of publication, publisher’s name, and year of publication

Collinson, Liz. Lorem Ipsum Sit Amet: A Completely Made-up Book for You To Cite. New York: Nonexistent Press, 2013. Print.

It gets more complicated for other types of works, such as book chapters, journal articles, websites, and unpublished manuscripts. For those types of work, consult one of the following style guides:

• Modern Language Association, by Purdue Online Writing Lab
• Chicago Manual of Style

I don’t care which one you use, but use it consistently and correctly.

Footnotes/Endnotes

Please feel free to use footnotes or endnotes, if you prefer, instead of the parenthetical citations I described above. It doesn’t matter whether you use footnotes or endnotes, but please use one or the other but not both. Footnotes appear at the bottom of each page, and endnotes appear at the end of the document.

No matter whether you use footnotes or endnotes, the in-text reference should be denoted by a superscript, Arabic numeral.

Maecenas congue ligula ac quam viverra nec consectetur ante hendrerit. Donec et mollis dolor.¹

For more information on using footnotes or endnotes, consult The Chicago Manual of Style. It is the standard for footnote and endnote citations.