Page 110 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 109
Unlike the hysterical Richard, Bolingbroke does have the
ability to remove those who endanger the state.
In trying to eliminate this particular kind of redundancy from
your essays, you may have to resist the blandishments of
alliteration. Surrender to them will not make you sound
‘cunning and calculating’, though they too often cause ‘fear and
foreboding’, or even ‘torture and torment’ in students’ essays
and tutors’ minds. Alliterative redundancies like ‘pathos and
poignancy’ will not meet a ‘sensitive and sympathetic’ response.
Two words which share the same initial letter may sound to you
as if they belong together. They do not, if the context allows
them to mean much the same.
To avoid another frequent source of repetition, do check
your longer sentences to ensure that all are making progress
and none is circling back to its starting-point. Beware the kind
of sentence which begins ‘Hardy is a pessimist’ and concludes
that ‘his novels do not sound hopeful’. Even if intervening
clauses between the two halves of such a repetition are full of
interesting movement, the surrounding stasis will still bore.
Whatever kind of inattention has led you into a repetition,
do at least avoid any laboured confession. To tell the reader
that your next words will add nothing new is hardly diplomatic
and yet versions of the following are frequently sprinkled
through students’ essays: ‘We have already seen that’, ‘As
explained before’, ‘As I have said earlier’, ‘It seems worth
repeating here that’. To a demanding reader nothing will seem
‘worth repeating’. The admission that you know your structure
has led you into redundancy but that you cannot be bothered to
revise it may seem rudely inconsiderate. Ideally eliminate all
repetition. If some does remain, at least be discreet and then,
however undeservedly, you may escape censure.

Precision

Precision in literary criticism is both a commitment to strict
truthfulness and the means by which that is achieved: close
observation. You must, of course, observe precisely what words
the text itself chooses and exactly how it deploys them. Only
then can you form a sufficiently accurate view of how it works.