Page 34 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 33
quotations from works published at each stage of a developing
word’s life. You can thus see how words were used in texts
contemporary with the one which you are studying.

LEAVE EACH BOUT OF READING MEMORIZING A SPECIFIC

If you pause at the end of one act of a play or a chapter of a
novel or one poem in a collection, do not close your mind as
you close the book. While you are making a cup of coffee or
putting on your coat to go out, recite to yourself a line or
phrase from the text which you have just been reading. Each
time, you should acquire some fragment of the text’s own
texture even if the extract is no more than three or four words
long. What you have learnt by heart you can carry around in
your head. Pondering, even in the oddest places, such unofficial
acorns can often nurture them into intellectual oaks of
extraordinary strength and complexity.

Make notes

Do not just start turning the pages of a specified text, hoping
that insight will seep up through your fingertips. Read with pen
in hand and a determination to make frequent notes. Unless you
are constantly looking for points worth recording, you will
discover few and remember less.
Some of your notes should be exposing such localized details
that you may want to add underlines and marginalia to the
relevant page of the printed text. Such annotations are unlikely
to muffle the text’s own chosen chronology since that remains
visibly present among your own comments. When later you
consult your running commentary you still have the appropriate
passage of the text before you and can discover more than you
had first registered. You may find it helpful also to compose
your own index inside the back cover of a book, assembling
references to all the contexts in which a particular character
appears or some recurrent theme is explored or some crucial
word is deployed. Of course, you may be among those who
regard the marking of books as sacrilegious. Even if you are
not, the copy that you are reading may not be your own but the