comparison essay
this is not recearch essay
requirements for introduction
As with other types of essays, your introduction should start with a hook. Then, you should narrow down the topic by providing context. Finally, your introduction should end with a strong thesis statement. Try to include the topic, controlling idea (Will the essay focus on similarities, differences, or both?), and a list or number of points in your thesis if possible.
requirements for conclusion
As with other types of essays, your conclusion should start by restating the thesis statement using different vocabulary and structure. Then, you should summarize the main points of the essay (this could be one sentence or several). Finally, your conclusion should end with an opinion, prediction, suggestion, or some other type of statement (like a comment or connection).
Note: use simple English for English language learners
topic from the attachments
LastName 1
First Name Student
Prof. Daniel Brengel
WRT 1010
30 October 2015
Shopping in America
Since the 1950s, American shoppers have been spending their money in suburban malls
instead of in downtown business districts. This is even true of shoppers who have to go out of
their way to shop in the malls; they will bypass downtown stores (which they might have gotten
to by convenient bus) to drive to the brightly bedecked and weather-free meccas of shopper-
heaven. The result, some people claim, is the demise of the central urban commercial district,
downtown, a process leading inevitably toward more widespread urban blight. There are several
reasons why Americans are so easily lured to shop in malls, which are so different from
shopping downtown.
First, Americans do not like weather. They like to be indoors whenever possible, even on
nice days, and they are willing to pay a premium to be protected from the elements. If they can
find someone who can afford it, they will even put their sports stadiums under a gigantic bowl,
and they love to stay indoors for a day of shopping, perhaps never seeing the sun from the time
they first enter until they leave, hours later, relieved of money, oxygen, and much money.
Second, Americans love convenience and, except during the crush of major holidays, malls offer
plenty of convenient parking. A happy, enormous island of commerce in a sea of asphalt, the
mall offers plenty of docking points — usually next to major commercial outlets — for cars that
circle in search of the closest slot and an easy entrance.
LastName 2
Third, the mall offers an extraordinary variety of products under its one gigantic roof.
Specialty stores and boutiques offer items that people don’t realize they need until they’re put
under the spell of brightly lighted, beautifully furnished window after window of beguiling
wares. Malls are built to respond to Americans’ insatiable desire for stuff; either that, or a
generation of Americans has been genetically engineered to respond to the sellers of stuff. Either
way, it works.
And finally, the mall feels safe: It is lighted, warm, dry, and busy. Senior citizens are
invited to do their walking exercises there in the early hours; physically challenged people easily
meander the smooth floors of curbless, stairless businesses in motorized carts; children are
amused by clowns and fed at convenient cafeterias in Food Court. Malls are friendly places.
America’s downtown, on the other hand, is often in sad repair. Parking is difficult, if not
dangerous, and until customers get through the door, everything is outdoors. To get from store to
store, shoppers must go out into the heat, cold, rain, and snow. There are sometimes solicitors to
take the shoppers’ money even before they even get into a store. If there is a plan here, it is not
evident to most shoppers. Where is the information kiosk with a cordial, well-informed attendant
to direct them to the nearest clothier, jeweler, fast-food outlet, or bathroom? Is there a bathroom?
What is left in the American downtown to recommend it to shoppers? One could say
practically nothing. Nothing, that is, unless the notion that the businesses taking the money from
the shoppers is owned by people and families from the surrounding community. Yes, there may
be chain-stores; it seems there has always been a W. T. Grants, a J. C. Penney’s, a Whackers.
But the people who owned the franchise and worked behind the cash register were people that
could live in the neighborhood. Walking into the downtown hardware store, shoppers often feel
wood, not vinyl linoleum, beneath their feet. And some old guy, who seemed old when he sold a
LastName 3
hammer to the previous generation, will sell nails in a paper bag, weighing them out by the
handful until getting the exact number the customer needs, not the arbitrary number that comes
in a hermetically sealed plastic box.
Next door, in the department store, there will be two women who know the customers by
name and who cannot wait to help them find what they need or will let them wander among the
shelves if they want. In the drug store across the street, the pharmacist knows the customers’
aches and pains and what they have been taking for them the last five years and what upsets their
stomachs and knows to call their doctors when the prescription does not make sense.
The truth is that the American mall grows where it does because someone with enormously
deep pockets decides to plunk it down where there used to be woods or a golf course. He
surrounds it with hundreds of acres of parking and waits for people to come spend their money,
as he knows they will because people will do what mass advertising tells them to do. Downtown,
on the other hand, grew where it did because there was an organic need for it. It was a
community’s response to a community’s needs — neighbors responding to neighbors — and it
flourished as the community flourished. If the mall can replace this sense of community, then so
be it; it deserves the affection of the people who visit there as well as their dollars. If it cannot,
then all consumers have gained is convenient parking and freedom from the weather at an awful
price.