Writing Compare And Contrast Essays In College Students

Literature review

An essential information is going to be given about the major aspects of this study in this section. Since , the Main focus would be on students ' academic contrast and compare essays and examine the discourse markers used in them, crucial definitions would be clearly stated in the following lines. Comparing and contrasting assignment is simply an essay that involves two topics and presents how they are similar and how they are different. It is well known that writing contrast and compare essays has to be done academically in which is considered as an important element of academic learning. Furthermore, in order to administrate academic piece of writing, students have to organise clear ideas and link them academically. The main two concerns when writing compare and contrast assignments are how to response to what they have in their minds and how to connect what was mentioned together (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987).

Discourse markers defined as phrases or words that used to indicate how statements and previous speeches are related to each other.

The first type consists of six sub- types. The first sub-type is called contrastive markers such as, “however”, “but”, “on the other hand”, “although”, and “whereas”. The second sub-type is called elaborative markers for example, “also”, “and”, “as well as”, “moreover” and “in addition”. The third sub-type is called inferential markers such as, “thus”, “so” and “therefore”. The fourth sub-type is called reason markers for instance, “because” and “since”. The fifth sub-type is called conclusive markers such as, “in conclusion” and “to sum up”. The last sub-type is called exemplifier markers for example, “such as” and “for instance”. Additionally, topic-relating markers are the second type of discourse markers such as, "by the way” and “back to my original point” .(as cited in Rahimi, 2011,