Page 105 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature
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104 How to write critical essays
contrast, where you do instinctively feel that the present tense
is appropriate, you are probably responding to what the text’s
own voice still presents.
Try anyway to reduce the frequency with which you refer to
an author and to increase your references to a text: wherever
you are about to use a writer’s name as the grammatical subject
of a sentence, consider substituting the title of a relevant work.
Economy
BE BRIEF
Some tutors specify a minimum number of pages which the
essay must reach. Such demands must be met by finding enough
to say: not by saying little at excessive length. At every stage use
only as many words as are needed to advance your argument,
or to make it more comprehensible, or to render it more
convincing. Any word which does none of these wastes both
your own and your reader’s time. It also makes it harder for
you both to notice the words that do matter. After composing
one verbose paragraph you may be unable to spot, among the
mist of superfluous verbiage, the relatively few points which it
has made. If so, you will begin the next paragraph with a hazy
sense of direction. You may lurch off at a tangent; or repeat a
stage of the argument which has already been sufficiently
explained.
Your reader, too, wearied by struggling through redundant or
repetitive phrases, may be tempted into skip-reading. There is
no guarantee that the skipping mind will consistently leap over
the meaningless froth, and keep landing on the meaningful
stepping-stones. It may do precisely the opposite. Then your
essay will not just be criticized for taking too long to say what
you think. It will be condemned as failing to demonstrate any
thought at all.
DO NOT PROMISE: PERFORM
Essays often waste words in laboured statements of intent:
