Page 138 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Presentation 137
Tutor’s comments

With your bibliography completed, your essay should finally be
presentable and can be submitted to your tutor. Yet that
moment is only the end of one phase and the beginning of
another.
Most obviously, but perhaps least importantly, this essay
may eventually be awarded a mark. Remember that different
teachers, even when they are working in the same institution,
can mean quite different things by any alphabetical or
numerical label attached to an essay. Some will mark roughly
according to the standards of a Finals examiner, and some far
more generously. Others may use a flexible system of carrot-
and-stick, adapting their mark-scale so as to motivate a
particular student at a given stage of the course. A few will be
downright casual about what mark they allocate and instead
concentrate all their efforts on supplying detailed and
constructive responses to your ideas and their expression.
You should pay most attention to comments. These may
anyway be a far better guide to how well you have done than
the mark can be. Once you have your tutor’s reactions, your
thoughts should already be turning to how much better you can
do next time. Use your teacher’s remarks to think further about
the topic and to appreciate issues which you had under-
estimated or even ignored when you were writing the essay.
Look, too, for any guidance on how your structure or style
might be improved and resolve to reconsider that advice while
you are actually working on your next piece of criticism.
If you are uncertain as to whether you have fully
understood some comment, do seek clarification. The
enterprise of all literary critics is sometimes described as a
communal debate and certainly the progress of the apprentice-
critic should depend on a dialogue with the teacher. You must
overcome any laziness or shyness which might prevent you
from ever initiating that dialogue. Often you will have doubts,
curiosities, wishes or even simple needs of reassurance that
your tutor may not be able to guess.
To reveal these may, on occasion, seem daunting.
Beforehand, it may take an uncomfortable amount of
intellectual effort to discover precisely how your problem
should be defined. It may then require an unfamiliar degree of