Page 62 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Planning an argument 61
Notice here that a latently static see-sawing between opposed
views of the same topic is only allowed to last for two
paragraphs. The third usefully advances to a new possibility. In
dividing and ordering paragraphs remember that critical
arguments move forward. Your plan must allow your essay to
progress.
You may have an adequately long list of clearly distinct
paragraphs, but find no guidance in the title as to how you
should order them. You may have been simply told to ‘Write an
essay on Blake’ or to ‘Discuss the aims and achievements of
Browning’ or to ‘Give an account of Byron’s intellectual and
moral concerns’ or to ‘Show the variety of Herbert’s poetic
techniques’. With luck and effort, the note-taking process may
have alerted you to a central controversy around which you can
order your individual paragraphs as a coherent debate.
Alternatively, your own convictions may lead you to link a
whole series of localized propositions into a single, developing
argument. If neither of these strategies has emerged, you are at
risk. You may be about to blunder into a list-like sequence of
unrelated paragraphs. Each may begin with an implicit
confession of its own arbitrary positioning and your essay’s
shapelessness:
Another interesting aspect of Blake’s verse is….
Browning also had other purposes. For instance, he aimed
to….
Other poems of Byron are about a very different subject….
An equally common feature of Herbert’s style consists of….
One further poem deserves analysis….
Instead of constructing an overall argument, the authors of such
sentences just assemble a random run of self-contained,
miniaturized essays.
You will usually be able to see that some paragraphs might
be grouped together as aspects of the same broad topic. But
thinking in terms of vaguely defined large divisions can do more
harm than good. It provides the false security of thinking you
have planned an argument when you have actually done
nothing more intellectually strenuous than would be required if
you had been asked to slice a cake. You may, at worst, think in
terms only of the first half of your essay and the second. You
might lump all your paragraphs about Browning’s apparent