Page 93 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

92 How to write critical essays
Your first essays may thus have to confess to being far more
derivative than you would wish. Fear not. More image-
enhancing originality can be claimed later when you are able to
offer it. Meanwhile, you must concentrate on persuading your
tutor to become your ally. His, or her, support is, and will be,
needed. In the short term, your tutor may be your most crucial
adviser as you work to turn yourself into a better critic. In the
longer term, your paths may cross again. There may be
examinations to take. You may want a job reference. Whatever
naïvety or ignorance you must at first confess, your tutor
should still be willing to provide all the help you want both
now and in the future. If, however, you have once allowed your
reader to mistake you for a crook, you had better look
elsewhere for assistance. Your tutor will be busy with more
certainly deserving students.

Specifying without verbatim extracts

At certain points of your argument, you may be able to make
sufficiently precise reference to the text without offering
quotations. It may be no less illuminating—and demonstrably
far quicker—to write of ‘the scene where A first meets B’ than
to copy out a massive chunk of their earliest dialogue. It may be
more sensible to describe a passage of a long poem than to
quote it. At certain moments in a discussion of Paradise Lost,
you might write of ‘Satan’s soliloquy on first reaching Eden’
rather than guess how many of its 182 lines your reader will be
prepared to plough through for no better reason than to
discover what passage you are talking about.
Numbers may sometimes be adequate: ‘In the last scene of
Act III’ or ‘only ten paragraphs after the beginning of the novel’
or ‘throughout stanzas 6 and 7’. Vaguely describing some
feature as ‘often’ present in a poem will be unconvincing. Yet
you need not quote every passage in which it occurs. You might
write simply that it occurs ‘in no less than seven of the twenty-
six lines which comprise the entire work (lines 1, 4, 8, 9, 14, 20
and 21)’.
Sometimes even substantial issues can be economically raised
by arithmetic although the discussion will soon need to proceed
to quotation: