Page 71 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

70 How to write critical essays
feel it would be too frustrating to abandon your essay without a
suggestive final paragraph to indicate how, if you had space and
time to explore more texts or other controversies, your
argument might develop.
Where such needs do not arise, and yet you still feel tempted
towards that pair of extra paragraphs, ask yourself whether
your problem is that they seem so easy to compose. What you
could fluently express without the discomfort of any hard
thought is almost certainly not worth saying.
Opening paragraphs seem particularly prone to platitudes
and irrelevances, so it may be that you should force yourself
to begin with a firmly stated idea which forms the first stage
of your argument. You may, instead, be in the habit of
offering information about a text’s historical period, or the
life of its author, or the view taken of it by some famous
critic. The effectiveness of a factual opening will depend on
your motives. It may be that you are merely trying to
postpone facing up to the real challenge. You just feel
nervous. Ideas seem risky. Facts, however irrelevant to the
set question’s specific demands or your eventual answer’s
chosen strategy, seem relatively safe. If you are merely
doodling your way into an appropriately courageous state of
mind, doodle on a separate sheet of paper, not in the first
sentences of your essay.
You can test whether your introductory facts are just
doodles by asking yourself these questions. Has the fact which
I am about to offer been chosen carefully from a sufficient
range of candidates? Do I understand how it is relevant to the
title and why it is itself unusually thought provoking? Will my
prose immediately explain what that relevance and those
thoughts are?
Of course, texts do exist in contexts. Facts about the society
that produced them or the ways in which they have been
subsequently processed to colour the modern reader’s approach
may by crucial. Nevertheless, you cannot yet hope to be as well-
informed on some areas as your teacher is. So a factual opening
may have the inherent disadvantage of stating only what your
reader already knows. If so, it will delay, however momentarily,
your offering something which the reader does not find
tediously familiar: the first of your own original thoughts.