Question

I'm writing an essay comparing two novels, and how the main woman in each one negatively influences the main man. unfortunately, I keep resorting to awkward and repetitive wording in order to keep the stories and women and men straight. Does anybody have any advice?

Answer 1

For example, I'm trying to reword this sentence so that it makes sense, but everything is either awkward sounding, confusing, or i've used it before: "Although Roxane and Julia are both supporting characters, their presence in the main character’s life becomes central to both Cyrano and Winston." Roxane and Cyrano are from one play, and Winston and Julia are from the other, but I'm having trouble differentiating. Any advice would be helpful!

Answer 2

(and it's Cyrano de Bergerac and 1984, by the way)

Answer 3

In this specific case you can word it as it is but then add respectively at the end. It would read "Although Roxane and Julia are both supporting characters, their presence in the main character’s life becomes central to both Cyrano and Winston, respectively." This implies that Roxane is central to Cyrano and Julia is central to Winston.

Obviously you couldn't use this in every sentence so you could use a few other ways.You could use seperate paragraphs for each novel and they would easily be told apart.

In this case you would talk about the first novel in the first paragraph(s) and then follow it by talking about the second novel in a seperate paragraph and then you have two options. Your options are to (1) use the second paragraph to describe the second novel while simultaneously comparing it to the first novel or (2) write a seperate pargraph after describing both novels that is soley for comparison of the two.

Hope this helps!