Page 118 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 117
certainly accurate substitutes. Whether the reader ‘might call’
the character ‘a fool’ is no business of the essay. Its task is to
commit itself to its own decisions as to the truest terminology.
There is similar evasiveness in ‘what we would probably
describe as’.
The ‘something of a’ formula is used by cowards who dare
not write what they mean (‘there is a failure’); or by fools who
do not know what they mean: ‘something’ could be anything
and so defines nothing.
‘Some’, ‘sometimes’ and ‘somehow’ should also trigger alarm
bells when you are checking a rough draft. Are you adding
sufficient detail to answer the begged questions?

FIND PRECISELY APT TERMS OF PRAISE OR BLAME
Terms which merely assert admiration can sound like
damningly faint praise. Too many writers, when describing a
work which they think not just good but unusually good, call it
‘great’. They thus evade tricky questions about exactly what
kind of interest it arouses and precisely what skills it shows in
doing so. Other words like ‘powerful’, ‘effective’, ‘significant’
and ‘important’ also tend to dodge definition of the particular
means used to achieve specific effects.
The following extracts offer other adjectives which shout a
hurrah but hardly say anything:
Goldsmith’s handling of the couplet form in ‘The Deserted
Village’ is magnificent.
Throughout The Faerie Queene Spenser uses beautiful
imagery.
The seventeenth chapter of Oliver Twist is one of the most
meaningful in the novel.
This last makes me wonder whether the writer thinks the worst
chapters are quite meaningless. The need, clearly, is not to
assert the quantity of meaning but to move straight to the task
of defining its precise quality.
A surprising number of students use ‘poetic’, ‘unpoetic’ and
even ‘poetry’ as evaluative terms. Byron’s arguably
sentimental love-lyrics are admired as being ‘very poetic’ but
his more urbanely cynical jokes in Don Juan are condemned