Learning to Unlock Texts: Comparing and contrasting

This month's addition to my series on textual analysis continues looking at methods of analysing texts, following on from our look into close reading last time. If you need to catch up, you can also read part 1 and part 2.

The second analytical method we’ll be looking at is another educational classic: the compare and contrast. In this process, instead of focusing on a single text we put multiple texts together and examine their similarities and differences. This comparison can tell us things that a single text couldn’t on its own, such as the defining aspects of a genre, the development of a writer’s work, or the differing perspectives of cultural movements on a single theme.

There is no hard upper limit to the number of texts that can be compared and contrasted with each other, though the more texts you add the more complicated the web gets. Each work is going to have a different relationship with every other work in the comparison, with different points of commonality and divergence. When you put all of these relationships together, you may start to see thematic patterns that you can build on, or perhaps you might notice that a particular text doesn’t fit into the group as well as you thought.