Page 79 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

78 How to write critical essays
language. You may prefer to treat them more seriously as
propaganda-machines whose linguistic components have been
assembled to confirm or challenge your beliefs. In either case,
novels are not natural phenomena but essentially verbal
constructs, designed with varying degrees of skill, to entertain
or manipulate.
You must quote if you are to reveal just how a novel’s
portrait of people and places and communities is contrived.
Without examples to show the ways in which a prose fiction
uses its language, your own prose can reproduce only a blurred
image of what the text pictures in detail. You need to expose
those verbal devices which shape and colour the reader’s
understanding of an event or a scene or a society. Even where
your main aim is to interpret an openly didactic work, you
cannot accurately identify its values unless you observe exactly
how these are defined by the text’s own terminology. Only
verbatim extracts can show that what a work says depends on
how it speaks.
If you are in doubt as to whether your essay is in danger of
offering too few or too many quotations, err on the side of
excess. Most tutors will be less resentful at having to read
superfluous extracts from the text than at being required to
decode your own prose where lack of examples has left it
bafflingly obscure.
Moreover, copying out quotations, even if some are not
strictly necessary to your argument, at least gives you the
chance to notice more about their chosen terms and possible
implications. So there may well be long-term intellectual
gains to compensate for any slightly lower mark on this
particular essay. By contrast, composing sentences which are
culpably uninterested in a literary work’s own choice of
language will just reinforce the bad habits of your mind’s
laziest ramblings.

RELEVANCE AND LENGTH
An essay is an argument, not an anthology. There is no
generosity in distributing quotations evenly throughout your
essay as if you were sticking coins into a Christmas pudding.
When you have nothing to say about a text, dotting extracts
from it among your own vacuous remarks is no defence.