Page 56 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Planning an argument 55
topics and ideas occur to you, as to whether each one will, in
the last resort, matter more or less than others. So, by the time
you come to write out a plan, many of the relevant policies
should already have emerged, and only need to be recorded in a
sufficiently centralized and economical format.
Writing out such a summary should certainly clarify your
scale of priorities and may usefully trigger some additional
ideas. However, its main use at this stage is to allow you to see
all the insights and arguments that you have produced earlier,
and to order them into a suitable structure.
Your plan will, of course, codify the distinguishable topics
that you mean to investigate, and outline the kinds of
information that you intend to deploy. You obviously need to
be clear about what and how much you can probe in the
available space. You do need to commit yourself to sounding
well-informed, which here will usually mean sounding well-
read. However, not all those who are well-read read well. So
your plan must also commit your essay to sounding thoughtful.
Check that it does not just list subjects but also summarizes
your opinions. Where it notes passages of the text that you
intend to cite, make sure there is some note as to the
significance you intend to claim for them. Anticipate a reader
who, whenever you observe some specific feature of a work,
will ask ‘So what? . The propositions that your essay will
’
advance need to be spelt out in the bald note form of your plan.
Then you can seize this last chance to check that they do reflect
your own beliefs or, at the very least, that they still seem to you
both tenable and interesting.

Narrowing the scope
You may find that your first version of a plan is committing
your essay to attempting more of the available tasks than can
be performed well in the space available. Many essay titles do
ask too much. They allude to so much literature in such vague
terms that an answer could grow to book length without
disgressing. You will often have to limit the range of your own
relatively brief essay.
This process of selection will, of course, have been in your
mind from the moment that you first began to read and make