Page 107 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

106 How to write critical essays
Any explicit claim that you, too, prefer not to cheat just wastes
space and arouses suspicion. The insistence, at the beginning of
the next sentence, that the text will be closely and observantly
examined also protests too much. The reader may fear that an
essay so proud of doing its job here may not bother to do so
elsewhere.

THE IDEAS IN YOUR ESSAY ARE ASSUMED TO BE YOUR OWN

Do not begin a sentence with ‘I think’ or ‘I feel’ or ‘I am not
unaware’ or ‘I hold the view that’ or ‘It is my own opinion
that’. Use your first words for a thought. Do not waste them in
announcing that, when you do get around to offering a
thought, it will be your own. Your reader is not likely to
mistake it for the word of God, or a report by the Arts Council,
or some involuntary burp from the collective unconscious.
Similarly, there is no point in writing ‘I would argue that’ or
‘I would maintain that’ if you are about to do so. Nor is it
helpful to preface your ideas with ‘I believe that’ or ‘I am
persuaded that’—unless you have the reputation of a liar. Other
wasteful announcements that you are still alive and well and
living somewhere in your essay’s argument are: ‘in my view’, ‘in
my opinion’, ‘for me’, ‘as I see it’ and ‘it occurs to me’. So long
as you are arguing and offering evidence—rather than merely
making undefended assertions—you will sound sufficiently
modest. Laboured use of the first-person singular pronoun can
in fact make your essay sound self-centred where it should be
centring on the text.
Using ‘one’ or ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ might seem less egotistical.
Yet these can sound presumptious in some contexts and evasive
in others. They should certainly not be deployed with ‘I’ to
concoct chaos:
One could argue that the individual lyrics of In Memoriam
are components in a unified artistic whole especially if we, as
I do, take Tennyson’s overall theme to be, not grief at the
loss of a friend, but panic at the loss of religious faith.
There are two escape routes from this dizzying oscillation
between self-assertion and passing the buck. The essay could
have specified some published critic who advances the view, and