Page 70 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Planning an argument 69
Criticism is not story-telling. Nor is it translation from the
text’s own language. It is illumination of that language’s precise
means and effects. For instance, the importance of a particular
device or implication may be that it recurs many times in a
work. You may then need to gather into one paragraph
examples which the text itself keeps apart.

Beginnings and endings

Someone may have told you that essay structure can rely on
the simple formula of ‘introduction, middle and conclusion’.
In practice this leads some students to concoct a first
paragraph which just announces their intention of writing an
essay, and a last which merely claims that they have done so.
The entire task of answering the set question and saying
anything useful about the appropriate text is thus left to the
intervening paragraphs. If these have been assembled
according to no subtler principle than that enigmatic concept
of a ‘middle’, they will be as shapeless and inert as a stranded
jellyfish.
Forget ‘introduction’ and ‘conclusion’ until you have
worked out a rational sequence for the main body of your
essay. It is here that you will have the most interestingly
difficult problems of discrimination and sequence. How do
you keep each major topic or idea sufficiently distinct for the
reader to know at any given moment just what is being
examined or advanced? How do you, while keeping that
present subject clear, ensure that the reader understands its
dependence on what has been established earlier and its
purpose in relation to what is yet to come?
If you solve these problems with sufficient care and
cunning, you may find that you have designed a structure not
just for the so-called ‘main body’ of your argument but for the
entire essay: to add an introduction and conclusion would be
superfluous.
Of course, there are legitimate uses to be made of
introductory and concluding paragraphs. Faced by an unusually
complex topic or an ambiguously phrased title, it may be
necessary to devote a first paragraph to identifying problems
and clarifying issues. So, too, there may be cases in which you