Page 98 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Style 97
James Joyce was not ignorant of the fact that human beings
are not always au fait with what passes in their own minds
and not always able to organize their observations into a
logical sequence.

Joyce knew that thoughts are often unconscious and
disorderly.

You may find that simpler phrasing exposes in time how simple
a proposition you were about to offer:
In Henry IV, Hal becomes subjected to a process of
education which finally enables him to assume with full
competence the duties which pertain to monarchy.
In Henry IV, Hal is gradually taught how to be a good king.

Such a point, however straightforward, may still seem
important enough to be included in your essay. However, you
must eliminate the verbal elaboration before you can decide
whether the idea is sensibly unpretentious or damagingly
naïve.

USE MODERN ENGLISH
Criticism is addressed to readers now. It is not aimed at the first
readers of an eighteenth-century poem or even at the original
audience of an Edwardian play. You should use modern English
unless quotation marks make clear that you are offering a
verbatim extract from some text written at an earlier stage of
the language’s development.
So good literature should be ‘praised’ not ‘lauded’. Ill-
tempered characters should be credited with ‘anger’ not ‘ire’.
Fast-moving prose may still have ‘speed’ but no longer
‘celerity’, and, even at its most efficient, should not now be
described as ‘efficacious’. Satirists no longer ‘mercilessly vilify’
those whom they ‘abhor’ even if they still ‘repeatedly attack’
those whom they ‘dislike’.
In your own prose, find modern equivalents for the text’s
archaisms and more remotely literary terms. You will then
sound properly curious as to what these do in fact mean.
You must, however, balance the advantages of a modern
style against the need to evoke a text’s own, perhaps outmoded,