Page 87 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

86 How to write critical essays
the number of acres and the use of ‘excellent’. In the end, the
land’s excellence is not dependent on its being beautiful to
look at and listen to (that charmingly ‘prattling’ stream
clearly has nothing important to say); land is ‘excellent’ if it
is productive and profitable to the owner who has invested
his venture capital in it.
The commentary which follows the quotation here centres on
just two terms—‘sheltered’ and ‘excellent’. Yet an interesting
argument about the text’s values is initiated and convincingly
shown to derive from close reading of the novel’s own prose.
The number of details noted in discussing a quotation is often,
as here, less important than the precision with which they are
used.
A less thoughtful student, having quoted the same passage,
might easily pick out many more words to quote again in the
commentary and yet say far less:
Many of Goldsmith’s terms here are tellingly apt. Most of
the adjectives, for instance, are particularly felicitous
choices—‘sheltered’, ‘beautiful’, ‘excellent’. The characters
are shown to be well-pleased with their new home. The
nouns tell us more than enough about the scene to explain
why they find it so attractive. We are given a clear picture
of the ‘habitation’ beneath the ‘hill’, the ‘underwood’ in the
background, the ‘stream’ in front, the ‘meadow’ and ‘green’
on either side. How carefully the novel here informs us
about its setting, even to the point of calculating the farm’s
size as ‘about twenty acres’. We are guided to hear as well
as see the ‘river’ since ‘prattling’ is such a brilliant adjective
to describe it.
The first commentary surely reveals more exactly what the
passage may be suggesting. It wastes less space on what all
readers are bound to notice and concentrates on more debatable
implications which can explain the student’s own response and
judgement.
Sometimes, however, quantity—though still a secondary
consideration—is important. If you ask your reader to work
through an unusually long quotation, your subsequent
commentary must be expansive enough to justify the exercise
Students who quote an entire paragraph running to ten