Comparison is a writing technique that virtually every college student recognizes as valuable, and most will use it with some frequency in their writing. Not uncommonly, however, when faced with the host of other issues that accompany the writing process, students fail to sufficiently examine the logic behind their basis of comparison, or set up a comparison so that it yields troublesome either/or arguments.

Scott Russell Sanders’ essay “Homeplace� can serve as an excellent model for students seeking to use comparison effectively in their writing. But before addressing his work in the classroom, I open discussion by asking the students to consider Edward Hirsch’s poem “Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad� in relation to the painting on which it is based. I ask students how their understanding of each piece affects the way they see the other, how they might come to understand the one in terms of the other.

A little grounding in the ideas of the color theorist Josef Albers can be useful at this point. I bring to class reproductions of paintings from his “Homage to the Square� series to illustrate a point regarding relationship. Each of his paintings depicts nothing more than a series of two or three colored squares nested within one another on a canvas. These paintings point to a critical distinction between “pigment� and “hue�: when a painter applies paint from a particular tube to backgrounds of various colors, that paint looks different in each instance as a result of its relationship to the background. Context, then, changes the very color of a color. Similarly, a writer can place two subjects alongside one another to re-color the way their audience sees each, can make each thing into something entirely new.

As they continue to compare Hopper’s painting and Hirsch’s poem, the students often catch themselves making qualitative judgments, saying that the painting is better in some ways, or that the poem is more original, etc. And then, often, someone throws up his or her hands and says it doesn’t matter, that they’re just different, that one can’t expect a painting to “mean� in the same way that a poem does, or vice versa.

These students can then be commended for recognizing that good critical thinkers guard against the temptation to oversimplify; it’s often incorrect to reduce the world to terms of this or that. But I’m quick to point out to my students that in expository writing an author may set up a simple opposition as a kind of dummy as a way of entering a subject, only to complicate and ultimately renounce the fallacious premise from which he or she begins.

For example, “psychologists tell us,� Scott Russell Sanders writes, “that we answer trouble with one of two impulses, either fight or flight.� But, he continues, “I believe that the Millers exhibited a third instinct, that of staying put.� I highlight this sentence for my students, and we proceed to discuss the many other ways that Sanders treats binary ways of thinking. In the end, then, students learn not only about the either/or rhetorical fallacy, but how a skilled writer can exploit it as a writing tool.

You can use this discussion to lead into a variety of writing assignments; one I commonly employ asks students to define an abstract noun. In a project such as this, your students should come to understand that they will likely have to do more impressive thinking if “kindness� is compared to “compassion� rather than “love� to “hate.� It’s a fine hair that separates the first pair. They seem almost to be indistinguishable shades of the same color. The student who attempts to distinguish between two words that seem to be synonyms must address the problem at the heart of all good expository writing: the comparison of what seems to be and what is.