Page 91 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

90 How to write critical essays
Smith and Jones comment:

Preliminaries can thus be neatly brief.
The guidance offered after your reader has considered the
quotation will nearly always need more space. If the remark is
worth citing, its detailed implications deserve explanation. If it
directly helps your own argument to advance—even when it
does so only by exemplifying the weakness of some alternative
approach—its exact contribution needs to be defined. Where
you discover that these conditions do not apply, delete what
must be an unwarranted interruption of your own prose.

Paraphrase and plagiarism

When you want to refer to someone else’s published opinion, do
try to use a verbatim extract. Where you cannot find a
sufficiently succinct quotation with which the critic’s view can
be characterized fairly, you will have to paraphrase. Beware.
The risk is that you will fail to make it absolutely clear that this
material is borrowed even though its abbreviated expression is
your own. So, before you begin to summarize any idea from a
published essay, name its author. Begin with some version of ‘X
writes that’ or ‘Y’s approach is to’.
Do not start off by offering the idea, intending later to add
some retrospective statement such as ‘this point is made by X’.
At best, such a sequence temporarily misleads. Your reader
begins to remember having read the same series of observations
elsewhere and cannot yet be sure that the debt will be properly
acknowledged. At worst, you could forget to admit the loan
and to identify the lender. Then you will never be able to prove
that you were only being absent-minded, not deceitful. Legally,
the unacknowledged use of an author’s ideas or words is an
offence. The laws of copyright make published material the
author’s personal property. Brief use of it may be made
provided the precise source is explicitly acknowledged.
Surreptitious use of it, deliberately misrepresenting the
borrowed as the invented, is plagiarism which the law treats as
theft.
Of course, you may believe that ideas and their verbal
formulations should belong equally to all and that here at least,
in intellectual capitalism, property can itself be theft. You may