Page 100 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 99
Hamlet is essentially about the hero’s struggle for sanity in a
world of baffling contradictions but, being a typical tragic
drama of its period, it tries to enlist the audience’s support
for an act of revenge and the play is thus often distracted
from its subtle characterization of the Prince’s thought-
processes by a clumsy pursuit of melodramatic plot.
By forcing three distinguishable ideas into a single, blurred
statement, the writer fails to explain how they relate. An
alternative version might be designed in three sentences:

Hamlet may often seem to be about the hero’s struggle for
sanity in a world of baffling contradictions. However, at
moments it is still typical of its period in encouraging the
audience to support a decisive act of revenge. So the play is
often distracted from its subtle characterization of the
Prince’s thought-processes by a clumsy pursuit of
melodramatic plot.

Clearer though this draft is, it may still ask each sentence to do
too much. In the last sentence, for instance, there are two
judgements—one positive (‘subtle’) and one negative (‘clumsy’).
Perhaps each deserves a sentence to itself.
Moreover, the division into more sentences reveals how
many large, ill-defined and unsupported claims are being made
here. Perhaps each needs to be followed by extra sentences
which offer further definition and supply some specific evidence
to show how tenable the idea is. Shorter sentences will not just
make your argument clearer to the reader. They may reveal to
you in time that the point you were about to make is too bald
to be convincing.
You will often have to compose a sentence whose job is to
define more precisely the claims made in the previous one. For
instance, the suggestion that the play is ‘about the hero’s
struggle for sanity’ might be expanded by the following
sentences:
Hamlet strives to make sense of contradictions which could
drive him mad. There is Claudius, an honoured king who has
committed a squalid murder. Almost as baffling is Ophelia, a
prudish young girl who is willing to prostitute herself as a
spy. The hero wrestles with such paradoxes in bewildering
isolation, resorting to soliloquy because he is deprived of