Essay: Compare and Contrast: “Under Contradiction Lies Similarity” The challenge for Essay #3 is to write a 5-7 page essay in which you engage the rhetorical strategy of compare and contrast to argue a particular position. This assignment asks you to engage in both comparison and contrast, discussing similarities and examining differences, but more importantly to consider possibilities of unusual or unsuspected similarities or differences. Go beyond obvious points of comparison or contrast. This is really asking you to use a complex critical thinking skill and then to put that skill to work in a piece of writing. You’ll need to do a bit of research because not only will you be presenting this information to your reader, you’ll be learning about your topics in order to describe them in detail. This is an assignment largely about taking the time to find out about something you think you already know—but be prepared to be surprised by what you find out. Comparison and Contrast strategy asks us to rethink what we think we know and then by writing about this, we make new knowledge and meaning. Topic: You may choose any topic as long as it is an issue that relates to your practice as a nurse or to your work in the health care field; or feel free to choose an issue that you have been introduced to in your other classes in the BSN and make that the focus of your paper. For this paper, you must use at least two scholarly sources from the Maria College library (online journals or e book). There are two basic organizational patterns for this type of writing. Consider either engaging with an alternate pattern (where the writer moves back and forth between the two “issues” for lack of a better descriptor, contrasting and comparing point by point or characteristic by characteristic) or the block pattern (the writer gives all the significant characteristics or points of one “issue” in a block. Then, in a corresponding block, the characteristics or points of the second “issue” are compared and contrasted with the first). Your paper will be another opportunity for you to demonstrate your attention to having a thesis statement (an argument), to your awareness of your audience, to employing scholarly research skills by using APA documentation style for every source you use.