How to Use Key Phrases in Your Compare/Contrast Essay

How to Use Key Phrases in Your Compare/Contrast EssaySome years ago, when I was getting ready to graduate college, I had to take an AP US History exam. I took an AP exam for my first semester of college and it was hard for me to prepare for the next exam because I had no idea what topics I should be looking at. Since then, I've discovered a way to have the confidence that comes from knowing what you are doing well and what topics you should avoid, but also how to use key phrases in your essay to make them much more interesting.You can't decide on a topic if you don't know what the other topics are. All I knew about AP US History before my final exam was a word-to-word dictionary of some of the terms used in the course. I knew that most of the course involved about five main topics. I never once really studied those topics; I was just able to find good examples that I could apply to my essay topics and ended up with a coherent, interesting final product.In addition to this, I also kne w that there was some particular technique I could use to make the topics in my compare/contrast essay topics stand out. The trick is in making the topics stand out from each other and from the rest of the text in the essay. I didn't know how to do this, but I did know that by thinking about key phrases that I was going to use, I could write better essays. So I looked at the topics in my AP course book and I started to think about the key phrases that would help me organize the texts into different topics.It took me quite a while to come up with three key phrases that would be effective in my essay topics, but I eventually came up with these three that made the topic look cohesive: the topic I'm going to cover, the time period in which the topic is covered, and the location. In other words, I was going to cover some history of what happened at one point in time in some place, I was going to cover some time in that period, and I was going to cover the location of where the subject wa s located.You might think that this method will be too limiting, but if you can follow the advice I'll give you, you can actually analyze your compare/contrast essay topics and you'll quickly figure out what keywords you need to use and which of those keywords are going to help to emphasize the topic. This method has been very helpful for me to teach myself to write.To start, you're going to want to know what terms are used in the essay and what they mean. I've found that I can use any of the many online dictionaries for this purpose. Go to Google, type in a term, and you'll find several options. The key thing is to determine which of the choices is going to make the topics appear coherent.Once you have some key phrases that work well for your compare/contrast essay topics, use them in your essay. For example, if you're going to cover 'forcible population growth,' the phrase 'famine'invasion' should be avoided. I find that a better phrase would be 'mass deaths'widespread deaths.' Tr y to use more closely related terms instead of terms that have a single meaning, as they may not really fit the main idea.Include your key phrases in your first paragraph, and then use them as an additional paragraph in your compare/contrast essay. Give it a shot and see if it helps you to organize your text and to make it more interesting. In time, you'll get used to writing more effectively with your keywords. Also, you'll probably find that you can add them to your writing in different ways, so keep trying them out and you might discover more ideas that you hadn't considered before.