Page 53 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

52 How to write critical essays
think of a book or how best to design an answer to your essay’s
question. Spell out your feelings of pleasure or bafflement or
anger at what a text seems to be doing and saying. Discover
whether others understand your response, and do your best to
understand theirs.
If at a late stage of preparing for a particular essay you still
feel you have nothing to say which could interest a friend or
relative, start worrying. Perhaps you have still not bullied
yourself into finding sufficiently interesting ideas. Then you
must be at risk of perpetrating the offence of producing an
essay which merely states the drearily obvious. Perhaps, even
though you are full of latently entertaining thoughts, you are
still so vague about them that you cannot verbalize them
adequately. If so, you are far from being ready to write your
essay. What you cannot yet explain to someone who knows you
well will make no sense to your tutor.
The grimmest explanation would be that you yourself are
not sufficiently interested in how literature works to enjoy
discussing it in your free time. In that case you should transfer
to a different course. Find some subject about which you can
care enough to think hard and do well.
If, on the other hand, literary texts are what you want to
understand and yet you are still trying to make sense of them
alone, you must be mismanaging your social life. Change it.
Just possibly you should be trying to make new contacts but it
is far more likely that you merely need to nerve yourself to
make better use of your present ones. Work out what fear is
inhibiting you and overcome it. Remember that others too may
be hiding their own fears of being thought foolish or ignorant
or over-earnest or simply interfering. Help them to help you.
You are unlikely to write well about literature unless you can
hear how you and others talk about it.