Comparison essay help sought: Hamlet and Crime and Punishment

by Lauren
(Boulder, Colorado )

I am comparing Hamlet and Crime and Punishment. I have come up with many great parallels between the two novels. However, I want to incorporate the Ubermensch theory to Hamlet, which is commonly applied to Crime and Punishment.

Linda responds If I were a mind-reader, Lauren, I might be able to figure out why you are seeking essay help, but since you ignored the directions for using the forum, I'm going to guess that you don't know how to write a comparison essay.

Let's start with some basics.

First, William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play, not a novel. If you are comparing Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment with John Marsden's Hamlet: A Novel you need to make that clear to readers like myself who will naturally associate the name Hamlet with Shakespeare the playwright.

Now for the tough stuff.

A comparison essay is one that finds similarities between two items. In this case, you are planning a literary analysis that is also a comparison. (See the essay help question prior to yours for information about writing a literary analysis.)

Comparison essays are organized using a modification of the thesis-and-support pattern. Instead of discussing, for example, skitmangles (whatever they are) in Hamlet, you must discuss skitmangles in Hamlet and skitmangles in Crime and Punishment.

Writing a comparison is twice the work of writing a single-focus essay; usually the comparison is longer, also. I'd guess that an adequate comparison of Ubermensch theory in Hamletand in Crime and Punishment could easily run a hundred pages.

The process of writing a literary analysis involving comparison is identical to that of writing a single-focus essay:

1. State your working thesis in a single sentence.


2. Develop your writing skeleton™ and test it to eliminate overlapping points.


3. Plan the evidence you will use.


4. Compose your essay, adding an introduction and conclusion.


5. Revise, edit, polish.

When you compose your essay, you have two options for organizing the body paragraphs. You can go through all your material on the Hamlet side of the topic and then do the same thing in the same order for the Crime and Punishment side. Or you can zigzag between the two works, discussing skitmangles in Hamlet and then skitmangles in Crime and Punishment before you go on to another point of comparison.

Readers will expect you to have roughly the same amount of discussion on each half of your topic. If your discussion of skitmangles in Hamlet runs two paragraphs, you should have about that same amount of discussion of skitmangles in Crime and Punishment.

Your essay is also going to require you to explain the Ubermensch theory. You'll need to do that in your introductory paragraph(s) because the term is not a common one.

One final note: When you edit your paper, be sure you look for misplaced modifiers, such as the one you have in the second sentence of your entered text. You should also have someone else read your paper for word usage errors, such as "incorporate to" in that same sentence.