Page 57 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

56 How to write critical essays
notes. Now you must make your final decisions, and some may
seem bitterly wasteful. Whole areas of debate which you have
pondered may have to be excluded. Whole texts on which you
had made notes may, after all, have to remain unmentioned. A
large idea or localized observation which had seemed to you so
innately interesting that you looked forward to including it in
your essay may turn out to be irrelevant to your planned
argument and have to be discarded.
The relationship between this selection of your material and
your strategy for arranging and ordering it needs to be flexibly
reciprocal. If you find that many of your favourite quotations
or shrewdest comments are having to be excluded because your
intended structure provides no logical place for them, ask
yourself whether your plan is right. Perhaps it should be
adapted or expanded.
Remember, however, that a shapeless holdall, however
generously packed with bright ideas and interesting quotations,
will confuse and bore your reader. If you try to mention too
many works, or even too many specific portions of one
relatively long work, you may find that there is space only to
mention them. That, of course, is useless. The mere assertion
that you have read, however hastily, thirty relevant poems will
not impress. The demonstration that you have thoroughly
explored three will.
Be ruthless. What your essay has room to discuss must be
decided rationally now. It must not be randomly imposed later
by your simply discovering that you have run out of space and
time in which to go on writing.

Weighing the proportions
Some titles and topics may require you to tackle so many
different texts and distinguishable techniques that the need for
selection has been self-evident from the outset and you have
produced a plan which lists your chosen items. You may still
have problems in deciding how much space each should be
allowed.
You might, for instance, be tackling this: ‘Do Donne’s secular
and religious poems employ similar techniques?’ Your plan’s list
of texts might contain a dozen titles: five religious poems, five