Page 36 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 35
yourself of exactly what you did notice about the text’s own use
of language. The actual process of copying out extracts may jog
you into registering more about their phrasing or their precise
implications. Do accompany each quotation by a reminder as to
why it strikes you as significant. Even if the reason now seems
to you self-evident, do trouble to spell it out for the sake of
your future self.
When you are reading a text for the first time, you will
have to settle initially for a simple, chronological arrangement
of notes following the text’s own sequence of chapters or
scenes or stanzas. In other cases you may choose to organize
some, or even all, of your notes into separate sections on
particular topics. If so, be sure that you do still notice the
text’s own choice of the order in which readers must meet its
manipulative devices of language or its puzzles and revelations
in thought and plot. Some of your headings could invite notes
about, for instance, narrative structure. All of your entries
should be accompanied by exact references. Fail to do this and
you will not just underestimate the significance of the text’s
timing; you may also waste an infuriating amount of time
later in finding some quotation whose accuracy you need to
check.
Allow your growing experience of the text to correct or
expand your sense of what the significant issues are. Expect to
delete or rephrase some headings and to add many more. Even
if you have not been asked simply to ‘write an essay on’ some
named text but are faced by a far more specific question, do try
to prevent its exerting an undue influence on what your notes
discover in the text. Your first guesses as to what will prove
relevant are likely to be too narrow. You anyway want to gain
much more from your reading than just one essay. How you
define your loftier or more hedonistic purposes will depend on
your own view of the uses of literature. However, you will want
these notes to have value long after you have written your
essay. Ensure that their range and depth will still be an adequate
resource when quite different issues are raised by an examiner
or by your own maturing curiosity.
You may think it worth while to accumulate, at the same
time as your full notes on the text, a separate and far more
selective series of jottings in response to the demands of a set
question. The inevitable duplication need not cost too much