How to Write Essays and Dissertations
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How to Write Essays and Dissertations

A Guide for English Literature Students

Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb

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eBook - ePub

How to Write Essays and Dissertations

A Guide for English Literature Students

Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb

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About This Book

The first book that literature students should read, this guide reveals the distinct set of skills, conventions and methods of essay and dissertation writing.

Taking students through the various stages of writing, from planning to final submission, it offers specific guidelines and a lively, detailed commentary on actual examples of student work at each stage.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2015
ISBN
9781317867975
Unit 1
INTRODUCTION
THE IMPORTANCE OF WRITING IN LITERARY STUDIES
A lot of the interest in studying literature comes from reading books. So does a lot of the pleasure. It seems reasonable, therefore, to think of a literature course as mainly a process of reading (and learning about) a series of prescribed or recommended works; in doing this as part of a structured programme of study, you develop specialised kinds of understanding and ability to investigate writing, and in this way you become proficient in the discipline.
This view of literary studies requires some qualification, however. It is true that the ‘input’ of your course consists largely of what you read and how you read it. But the assessed ‘output’ almost always consists of writing. Sometimes that writing takes the form of short written answers to prescribed questions (as it does in exams); sometimes it consists of extended coursework essays or dissertations. It is these written pieces, rather than your work in class or participation in seminar discussion, that form the main basis – in many cases the only basis – of the grades you are awarded.
Given such an emphasis on writing as the principal means of assessment in literary studies, the possibility arises that you might be able to succeed primarily on the basis of essay-writing skills, rather than on the strength of insights arrived at during reading. Such a view would be misguided. But it does capture an important point: that careful and sensitive reading counts for little in a course in literary studies unless it is linked to skills in constructing relevant arguments on the written page. Your success in reading – at least in the sense of gaining recognition in your course for the interest and value of your insights – will remain invisible unless you also know how to write.
That is why this book investigates writing skills and the study skills that support essay-writing: in effect, how you can embody observations you make about literary texts in appropriate written form. To help you develop or strengthen such skills, we propose to work step by step through the major processes involved in writing in literary studies:
• interpreting a prescribed question, or thinking of your own title or topic;
• anticipating what markers will look for in your essay;
• working out your basic ideas;
• making a first sketch or outline;
• using reference sources to extend your ideas with appropriate information;
• developing your argument coherently, from its introduction through to its conclusion;
• monitoring aspects of composition, such as grammar, spelling, cohesion and punctuation;
• submitting your finished work in an accepted academic format.
In the course of the book we will make concrete suggestions about each of these aspects of essay-writing. Together, these suggestions should help you break down the sometimes confusing overall experience of writing an essay into a series of distinct steps or stages, each of which you can analyse and learn to control.
FOUR BASIC PRINCIPLES
Before moving on to practical concerns, we begin with four basic claims about writing.
A. Writing means construction.
B. Writing involves a continuous process of re-construction.
C. Writing is a way of thinking.
D. Writing is different from talking.
Gaining a grasp of each of these claims can help overcome the most pervasive misunderstandings students have about what they are being asked to do. After discussing each claim in general terms, we put them together in order to suggest some specific ways you can use this book to improve your study and writing skills.
A. Writing means construction
In this book we do not treat writing as an activity of immediate selfexpression, in which you pour out ideas spontaneously and inspirationally. Instead, we treat writing as a process of composition: a craft of making or building something.
Books are read many times but are written only once. Almost the opposite is the case with essays written for literature courses: essays have to be written (in the sense of modified, altered or drafted) many times; but then they are probably only read by your reader once.
A large part of what you need to learn is accordingly how to take control of and steer the repeated stages of writing and rewriting that reshape your initial thoughts into a coherent, sustained argument that will have a clear and immediate impact. Many of the difficulties people encounter in writing essays arise because of the need to control a number of different aspects of organisation at the same time. You need to control:
the argument: so that the essay will be coherent at a conceptual level;
the information structure: to avoid presenting, as if they were new, facts or views likely to be well-known to and presupposed by your reader;
the discourse structure: so that your essay builds up, and has shape and development;
the style: so that the essay speaks in a voice you are comfortable with and which meets the expectations of your course;
the punctuation and grammar: so that the essay can be read easily and unambiguously;
the presentation: so that the essay can be read clearly in terms of layout, handwriting and typeface.
B. Writing involves a constant process of re-construction
There are some writers who gestate an idea mentally for a long time, then write it down perfectly formed. But such writers are a minority. Most writing – whether it takes the form of poetry, committee reports, memos and minutes of meetings, or literary essays – passes through successive revisions. It is repeatedly modified in the light of what a given expression of ideas looks like on the page. Most people find it easier to reflect on their thoughts once they are on the page, rather than trying to shape what will be a piece of writing while it remains a complex idea in their head.
The approach to writing we will encourage challenges the common belief (which you may still hear from some teachers and research supervisors) that you should start by doing all your reading and only then begin writing. On the contrary, we think you should do at least some writing before you read. Writing helps you understand what it is you will need from the books you read; the notes you take will be much more focused as a result. Writing also points you towards other books – and particular facts and arguments in them – that you will need to read but hadn’t previously thought of. Abstract intentions, and theoretical knowledge of what good writing may be like, need to take a back seat here to the practical approach of ‘try it on the page, see what it looks like, and then decide whether to keep it or how to change it’.
C. Writing is a way of thinking
Writing is a tool. Like diagrams, maps or numerical calculations, it is a resource to think with. Writing helps you organise and manipulate ideas into sequences or systems that cannot easily be held simultaneously in your mind. Importantly, it is also a tool you carry with you beyond literary studies: a so-called ‘transferable skill’. Studying literature is widely believed to provide training in thinking, and this book should help you make the writing process central to that training.
If you view writing as a means of thinking, rather than a way of telling someone something, then irrespective of who reads your essays they are vehicles for developing solutions to intellectual problems you set yourself. The process of writing in itself offers ways of working through questions in a more reflective and considered form than is possible in most spoken contexts of conversation or discussion. Seen in this way, writing an essay can provide a degree of satisfaction, and increased self-confidence, ultimately as valuable as the marks with which it is rewarded.
D. Writing is different from talking
When you talk to someone, your hearer can let you know whether or not they understand what you are saying. Your hearer can stop you and ask you to explain or clarify something. But your reader cannot ask for clarification in the same way, and you cannot ask your reader whether she or he has understood. You therefore need to provide everything essential for understanding in the written text itself; you can’t rephrase any parts that didn’t get across first time. This is one reason why writing is typically more formal and bound by more explicit rules than speaking.
However, ‘providing everything essential’ brings its own problems. If you provide too much background information, your reader will become bored and lose attention. So you need constantly to make decisions, as precisely as possible, about how much information your reader will need. You should not create the appearance of going over too much old ground.
Your essay unfolds over the period of time a reader takes to read it; so your choices about information are not only a matter of more-or-less. There also needs to be clear direction and development in what you write. Your essay should lead towards a clearlysignalled goal, rather than merely listing or presenting material whose relevance to your discussion hasn’t been explicitly established. When in doubt, there is a useful check you can carry out on yourself: imagine yourself as a reader of your work who keeps asking: why is she/he telling me this?
PRACTICE AND EXPERIMENTATION
Because writing is different from speech, it is possible to think of writing as a sort of ‘foreign language’, in that most people use the ‘language’ of written English with less fluency than they use the ‘language’ of spoken English. Improving your writing is like improving your use of a foreign language: practice helps.
Practice in essay-writing involves first putting boundaries round a writing task. For example, set a time limit of 40 minutes, and try to write a complete essay in this time (using an old exam question, perhaps); doing this successfully involves learning how to plan and time your work, and is of course useful in examinations. You should judge your success given the time permitted.
Alternatively, practice can mean taking special care over one small section of work. Take a fairly self-contained page or short section or paragraph from an essay and keep rewriting it, analysing the results of successive revisions.
Or try carrying out different parts of a task, in isolation from the overall process of writing an essay. For instance:
• work out what a question is asking you, without trying to answer it;
• make a list of paragraph headings for essays you don’t ever intend to write in full.
Learn from your practice, and keep notes of what you have learned. Next time you can avoid repeating mistakes by applying to a new writing task the general strategies you’ve already used successfully on at least one previous occasion.
PREPARING FOR WORK
Practice is all very well, but you can only practise effectively if you set yourself up to work effectively, and everyone works differently. Some kinds of improvement in your work may follow simply from thinking about how best you work and trying to make suitable practical arrangements.
Look for ways of making time for yourself to work, and a place where you can work productively. Home may be too full of distractions, and the boundary between work and other activities may be too thin there, so you may need to define somewhere else as your working place. If your working space is also your bedroom, then you may be in danger of not building a clear enough barrier between the stresses of your work and your need to sleep. If the library isn’t quiet, look for an empty room somewhere else, and work there. Exploit gaps; take something to read on the bus or while waiting in a queue. Keep a pen on you and some paper so that you can record good ideas whenever you have them.
These ideas as regards techniques follow from taking a long view of what you are doing, rather than expecting instant outcomes. Accept that you may spend a day at your computer while writing nothing of value, and that such unproductive periods are inevitable. Expect things to go wrong and plan for them; your printer breaks, or the mail is unreliable, or the library is shut. Vary the tasks you do during the day, so that tasks that seem boring or unpleasant are balanced out by easier and more enjoyable tasks. Be tough with yourself, however, about the difference between productive work and other displacement activities that can be ways of pretending to work (e.g. putting extensive effort into the visual layout of your document). Remember that it always takes longer to finish something (e.g. by getting your bibliography right, or proof-reading or printing) than you anticipate, and allow time for such tasks. Understand the deadlines set for you, and what happens if you fail to meet them. Finally keep in mind that, although each aspect of the writing process is something to think about and work on, you are almost always judged on what you produce, not on how you produced it.
EXERCISE
In the section ‘Practice and experimentation’ above, we illustrated the value of practising writing by suggesting some possible tasks you could set yourself. Read this section again. Choose two tasks we propose there...

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