Chapter 3
USING EXAMPLES AND COMPARISONS
Chapter overview
This chapter gives your students a crucial tool for doing the writing exercises: examples and
comparisons. And what makes writing exercises communicate better also makes business writing
communicate better.
Brief outline of the chapter
I. Examples. This section covers both brief examples (a phrase or two) and narrative
examples (relevant stories).
II. Comparisons. This section shows a few good examples of comparisons — often the most
memorable way to explain something.
III. Examples and Comparisons. This is an excerpt from a paper that uses an example and a
comparison well.
IV. Exercises.
General comments
Very few students coming into my classes know the importance of examples and comparisons.
That’s why I teach this chapter early in the course and concentrate, when going over student
papers, on pointing out where the writing would benefit from examples and comparisons.
Students seem to learn the value of examples best when they see a really good one in another
student’s paper. All you need is one of those early in the course, and you can refer to it time and
again. In one course, there was a great example involving a tennis racquet. From then on, with an
abstract paper, I’d say, “You forgot to put in the tennis racquet.”
Additional exercise
I often use an in-class exercise to help my students learn the value of examples. While going
over student papers, I find a likely target: an abstract statement that cries out for illustration.
Then I have the students work in pairs and actually write an example the paper could have used.
(Note: it’s important to choose a paper with the type of content that students could actually come
up with an example.) If appropriate, I then have students also write a comparison the paper could
have used.
This is a good in-class exercise because it helps show everyone — in a concrete way — the value
of concreteness!
Notes on the exercises
Exercise A (adding examples to illustrate abstract sentences)
Exercise B (finding an example in published writing)
Exercise C (finding a comparison in published writing)
Exercise D (revising a paragraph to add a narrative example)
I look for a solid paragraph or two here, and I encourage students to show a little humor. Here’s a
response from one of my students, Jennifer Shields, to this exercise:
Changing a tire on a car isn’t always as easy as the instruction books tell us. It never fails! A rainy
day, a big meeting in twenty minutes, my cell phone sitting at home on the charger and what do
you know? There I am stuck on the side of the road. My tire? FLAT … NO AIR … BIG NAIL!!!
Exercise E (revising their own writing to make it more concrete)