Page 101 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

100 How to write critical essays
dialogue. His one surviving parent is in love with his father’s
murderer and the friends of his student-days are now his
enemies.
Design a prose-style which pauses frequently to begin a fresh
sentence. It will encourage you to move on from a generalized
premise and advance to specific points.
Beware of compressing both an idea and the evidence which
supports it into a single sentence. The result is usually inelegant
and obscure:

It is not so much Hamlet’s dark clothing and bitter remarks
in the opening scenes as some of his almost reckless
behaviour in later scenes (his wild gestures towards Ophelia,
his rash killing of Polonius) which make us wonder about his
sanity (although, of course, it is possible to interpret his
apparent madness as feigned for purposes of political
prudence until the very end of the play).

The student should have spotted when drafting this sentence
that it attempts to use too many different moments in the play.
Unless your point is to compare or contrast, a sentence which is
about more than one passage is likely to be over-ambitious.
Divide it.
Another warning sign in the example above is the use of
brackets. Do not interrupt or extend a statement with some
parenthetical addition which deserves a sentence in its own
right.
The ratio of one sentence to one idea is a guideline not a
rule. There are contexts in which each of your sentences may
need to encompass a pair of points. Then there may be a risk of
monotony and you must consider another guideline: sentences
should vary in structure and in length.
In answering ‘Compare and contrast’ essay titles, your prose
may get stuck in a recurring structure. You may repeatedly
deploy some formula such as ‘On the one hand in X…but, on
the other hand in Y’, or ‘Whereas in X we find A, in Y we find
B’. A sequence of sentences where each begins ‘Whereas’ can be
tedious to read. Try to vary your syntax.
The content of the following sentences is meant to offer
helpful advice. Their structure, however, should demonstrate
the difficulties of reading prose whose grammar is repetitive: