Page 35 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

34 How to write critical essays
library’s or a friend’s, and then there can be no question of
adding even the most lightly pencilled comment.
Obviously you will anyway need to make fuller notes
elsewhere. Design a system for these that concentrates your
particular kind of mind and bully yourself into using it.
Do check, as your notes grow, that you are not just
producing a paraphrase. The risk of this is greatest when you
are handling a long work. You may be tempted, after reading
another chapter of a novel and jotting down a summary of the
main plot events that it contains, to stop writing and proceed
immediately to read the next chapter. Such notes will prove
almost useless when you come to write your essay. Of course, in
some contexts, narrative structure can be a relevant, and
indeed, fascinating issue; but to discuss it sensibly you will need
to have noticed and remembered far more than simply the
number of a chapter in which some incident occurs.
The most helpful entries in your notes will be those that
record your own thoughts about the significance of the passage
that your reading has then reached. Many of these will define
issues which you cannot hope to resolve until, at the very least,
you have read the entire text. Meanwhile, to read alertly means
to read questioningly. You should begin to be suspicious if, as
your notes grow, they are not including many suggestions that
end in question marks.
Another danger sign is a steady consistency in the length of
notes that each chapter of a novel or each scene of a play has
inspired. This will almost certainly mean that you are not
thinking hard enough to make even provisional decisions as to
which parts of the text matter more than others, and which
issues are so unusually complex that you need to use more
words if you are to remember what you thought.
Worry, too, if notes on later portions of a long work do not
include references to earlier ones. You cannot be thinking about
the impact of what you are reading if you do not notice some
emerging patterns of anticipation and echo, or some potentially
interesting points of comparison and contrast, which your essay
can eventually investigate.
Finally, do check that you are including verbatim quotations,
however brief some of these may be. If you are being
sufficiently alert to the ways in which style determines
substance, you will find yourself recording examples to remind