Page 66 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Planning an argument 65
PROPOSITION AND PROOF
You may believe so strongly in some thesis about how an
author or work should be read that you cannot argue the
antithesis with any honesty. The unconvinced sound
unconvincing; so sometimes both integrity and expediency
may require you to plead for one side throughout your essay.
The opposition must of course be demonstrably considered;
however, you perhaps regard its arguments as so feeble that
you cannot devote to them an equal share of your essay. To do
so might waste too much effort on mere demolition work, and
you may think that constructive criticism is most helpful to
you and your reader. It will usually be the texts, and not
misleading or irrelevant accounts of them, that your essay
means to expose.
Any assertion which you have found in the title and which
seems to you overwhelmingly true can form the backbone of
your essay. So can any view which you yourself have defined in
researching an answer. Whatever its origins, you must redefine
and complicate the proposition that you intend to support.
Your structure must separate it into a number of more specific
possibilities. One of these should have been offered before the
end of your first paragraph. Establish its exact implications, its
relevance and its credibility. Then use it to raise the next
possibility and set about confirming that.
Ask yourself in each case: would this paragraph make any
less sense, or be any less persuasive, if its argument did not
follow the point made in the previous paragraph? Does the
previous paragraph establish a view which I need the reader to
have understood and conceded before I can explain and prove
my present claim? If the answer is ‘No’, try again.
The danger is that you will just keep proving the same
limited point by different means. Instead of a progressive
argument, you settle into the stasis of an arbitrarily ordered list
of paragraphs where each merely offers another example in
support of the original, still inadequately vague, idea. For
instance, consider this title: ‘“Shakespeare’s middle comedies
explore the ambiguous boundary between playfulness and
seriousness.” Discuss.’ A poor answer to this might be no more
than a randomly ordered anthology of ambiguous moments
none of which was used to reveal more than the student’s