Page 106 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 105
Before embarking upon a detailed analysis of the actual text
of Conrad’s Lord Jim, it might not be inappropriate to look
at some remarks about the project made by the author
himself in letters to his friends at the time he was writing the
novel.

Perhaps the reader will soon be interested to read the extracts
from Conrad’s letters, and will later be impressed by ‘a detailed
analysis of the…text’; but no points can be gained here by the
assurance that these will eventually be offered.
You can see for yourself why most of the words in the
sentence are mere padding. However, one clause exemplifies a
surprisingly common redundancy: ‘it might not be
inappropriate to’. Other popular versions of this formula are: ‘It
is interesting to examine’, ‘It is worthy of note that’, ‘It is
significant that’, ‘We must not forget that’. Any point you are
about to make obviously seems to you appropriate and
interesting. You would not deliberately exasperate your reader.
If the ensuing material is irrelevant or dull or trivial, no
preliminary appeal can persuade your reader to see it
differently. If it is well chosen and well phrased, its effect can
only be weakened by any delay in reaching it.
Explicit claims of accuracy are often delaying mechanisms
too: ‘We can say with some assurance that’, ‘It is indisputably
apparent that’, ‘The way that this scene should be viewed is’.
Less shamelessly bullying but just as useless are the following:
‘So we see that’, ‘We may therefore conclude that’, ‘Thus it can
be seen that’. These last three tend to be so ubiquitous in
students’ essays that you can soothe your reader’s nerves simply
by cutting out every use of them before handing your own work
in. Of course the conjunctions (‘so’, ‘therefore’, ‘thus’) will
often need to be retained if the skeletal form of your developing
argument is to stay clear. Just prune the flabbier verbiage which
they so often trigger.
Promises of a judicious balance in your approach, or of a
willingness to support it with closely observed evidence, are
similarly no substitute for performance. Spot the redundancies
here: ‘Yet, to be fair, there are some passages of Don Juan
where Byron is not so evasively humorous but instead offers a
more committedly serious tone. On closer examination it can be
observed that’. All critics, one piously hopes, mean ‘to be fair’.