Both Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and Slaughterhouse-Five return to the bombing of Dresden, and both use unconventional structure to represent trauma. That overlap makes them an appealing pair for a comparison unit in upper-level English courses. The resulting essays can be excellent, but they are also difficult to grade because students must handle two texts at once. Clear criteria help you distinguish real comparison from side-by-side summary.

The greatest risk in comparison writing is the two-book summary. A student writes three paragraphs about Foer and three about Vonnegut, then adds a conclusion saying they are similar in some ways and different in others. Nothing in that structure requires an argument. Your rubric should explicitly reward essays that make claims about both books at the same time within a single paragraph.

Accuracy matters as well. In Foer's novel, the Dresden material appears mainly through the grandfather's history and his lost love, while Vonnegut's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, experiences the bombing as a prisoner of war and becomes unstuck in time. Students sometimes blur these details, especially when writing from memory. A quick accuracy check on each essay prevents confident but incorrect claims from earning credit.

Structuring the Comparison Around Ideas

The best comparison essays are organized by idea, such as how each author represents the impossibility of describing catastrophe. Under that idea, the student can discuss Foer's fragmented pages and Vonnegut's repeated refrain, showing how each technique expresses the same difficulty in different ways. This structure encourages analysis and makes it easier for you to see the argument. It should be the norm you set for the assignment.

• A thesis that names a shared idea and a meaningful difference
• Paragraphs organized by concept rather than by book
• Evidence drawn from both texts within the same paragraph
• Attention to how form supports meaning in each work
• A conclusion that explains what the comparison reveals

Scoring Evidence Balance

Students frequently lean on the text they remember better, leaving the other underrepresented. A quick scan of quotations can reveal an imbalance, and it deserves a comment because it affects the strength of the comparison. Encourage students to aim for roughly equal evidence when both texts are central to the claim. If one book is intentionally the main focus, the thesis should say so.

You may also want to grade the quality of transitions between the two works. Phrases that signal genuine relationships, such as one author uses repetition to convey numbness while the other uses fragmentation to convey overload, show careful thinking. Transitions that simply say however or on the other hand without a specific link do not. Marking these differences helps students refine their prose.

Feedback That Helps Students Revise

Since these essays are ambitious, students often need a revision cycle to get them right. A useful first-round comment is to ask the student to rewrite one paragraph so that both texts appear in it and so that it makes a single claim. This narrow task helps them internalize the structure without rewriting the whole paper. Many students find that the exercise transforms their understanding of what comparison means.

Peer review can help too, especially when reviewers use a checklist tied to the rubric. Ask each reviewer to underline one sentence that compares the two texts directly and one that does not. This exercise builds awareness of the difference between real and superficial comparison. It also lightens your grading load by improving drafts before they reach you.

Grading at Scale

Two-text essays are longer and slower to grade, which makes a consistent process even more important. Scoring one rubric row at a time across all papers can save hours and reduce drift in your standards. AI tools such as GraideMind can help by producing rubric-based first-pass feedback for each essay, including flags for paragraphs that discuss only one book. You keep control of the final judgment.

Whatever process you use, aim to return essays while the reading is still fresh. Students who receive feedback within a week can connect it to what they remember and apply it to the next assignment. Long delays undermine the benefit of even the best comments. Efficiency is not just about saving time, but about making feedback matter.