Writing Essays

A guide for students in English and the humanities

Richard Marggraf Turley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317424154
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Essays are a major form of assessment in higher education today and this is a fact that causes some writers a great deal of anxiety. Fortunately, essay writing is a skill that can be learned, like any other. Through precise explanations, this fully updated edition of Writing Essays gives you the confidence to express yourself coherently and effectively. It demystifies the entire process of essay writing, helping you to become proficient and confident in every aspect.

Writing Essays reveals the tricks of the trade, making your student life easier. You'll learn how to impress tutors by discovering exactly what markers look for when they read your work. Using practical examples selected from real student assignments and tutor feedback, this book covers every aspect of composition, from introductions and conclusions, down to presentation and submission. It also advises you on stress-free methods of revision, helps with exam essays, explains the principles of effective secondary source management, and shows you how to engage meaningfully with other critics' views. A new chapter will also guide you through the intricacies of the undergraduate dissertation.

As a full-time university professor, Richard Marggraf Turley counsels students and assesses their work every day, helping him to recognise the challenges that they face. Accessible, concise and full of practical examples, Writing Essays is a response to these challenges and will be an invaluable companion for Humanities students who wish to improve their grades and become confident in the art of essay writing.

Chapter 1
How to write introductions

What do you want to say in your essay and why?

At school and university, various tutors will no doubt have given you different or even conflicting instructions on how to negotiate this crucial stage in your essay. Don’t worry. This just underlines what I was saying in the preface about there being no single way to write essays. Cats skinned, roads Rome. But let’s look at a tried and tested method. I call it the ‘glorious four’, because there are, yes, four elements to it, which present:

1. The key aims and scope of the essay
2. A sense of the critical orthodoxy
3. An outline of your methodology
4. A succinct statement of your argument

In other words, an effective way of setting out your stall is to begin by saying what you wish to explore and indicating the texts you’ll be analysing; then (briefly) to identify the prevailing view of other critics in the field (the orthodoxy, which you may wish to write against); then to indicate your methodology (which might be, say, a feminist or historicist approach); and finally to boil down your own intervention into the debate, preferably to just a sentence or two.

Let’s look at these elements in turn. ‘The key aims and scope of the essay’ … It sounds a simple enough task, but it presupposes that you actually know what your aims are. Many students begin their essays without nailing this information down, which is a recipe for a disjointed, meandering disaster. If your reader knows what you intend to talk about, and most importantly why, from the outset, then they have more chance of mentally jumping any gaps you might leave in your argument. So let’s assume you’re writing an essay on Romantic poet John Keats and his rival, Barry Cornwall. Your topic is these poets’ ‘popular reception’ – that is, how they were received by readers of their day. I’d probably begin along these lines:

My concern in this essay is to explore how John Keats’s style is shaped by moments of strategic retreat from his rival Barry Cornwall’s more popular aesthetic. I wish to focus on the public reception of the two men’s adaptations of Boccaccio’s ‘Pot of Basil’ story – Keats’s ‘Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil’, and Cornwall’s A Sicilian Story, both published in 1819.

It’s not perfect, but it’s not a dog’s dinner, either. Your aims (your ‘concerns’) are stated clearly, as is the argument’s scope (two long poems). In fact, the above scores highly because it conceptualizes the argument from the get go. By that, I mean the first sentence isn’t merely descriptive (e.g. ‘I wish to compare Keats’s and Cornwall’s poetic styles’), but already introduces a big idea (namely, that Keats’s decision not to mimic Cornwall’s crowd-pleasing style was strategic). I’ll be returning to the distinction between conceptualized writing (good) and descriptive writing (usually bad, because inert and static), at several points in this book.

As far as giving a ‘sense of the critical orthodoxy’ goes, I might make the following noises:

Traditionally, Romanticists have been inattentive to the influence of Cornwall’s work in helping Keats decide what kind of a poet he wished to be. Indeed, Cornwall usually appears in standard critiques of Keats, if he appears at all, merely as a footnote to Keats’s narrative of precocious, onward maturity.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to name check a couple of scholars and publications guilty of ignoring Barry Cornwall:

… if he appears at all, merely as a footnote to Keats’s narrative of precocious, onward maturity. In stark contrast to his high profile in William Hazlitt’s 1824 anthology of Romantic poets, Cornwall is represented by a single sonnet in Jerome McGann’s The New Book of Romantic Verse (1993), and is not, and has never been, included in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which in 2012 reached its ninth, expanded incarnation.

We can leave more detailed discussion about Cornwall and Romantic scholarship to the argument as it unfolds.

On, then, to my ‘outline of the methodology’. An approach that seems appropriate to the project I’m describing is New Historicism, a theory attuned to the ways in which literary texts are embedded in the wider material culture of their age. Let’s fold that element into our ‘glorious four’:

This essay adopts an historicist perspective to explore the mutual bearing of Keats and Cornwall in 1819, focusing on the two poets’ differently angled participation in the burgeoning print culture of the day.

And finally, a ‘succinct statement of my argument’ – that is, of my essay’s intervention into the debate around Cornwall’s influence on Keats:

I argue that the interaction of Keats and Cornwall – both in its textual and social dimensions – was richer and more mutually transformative than critics have allowed hitherto.

Put those four elements together, and we get an introduction that’s actually not bad. At any rate, it’s clear, conceptualized and well structured. Let’s look at a published example of an introduction that does pretty much what I’ve been describing: Jane Moore’s ‘Plagiarism with a Difference: Subjectivity in “Kubla Khan” and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992). Here’s Moore’s first paragraph (don’t worry about the technical terms; just concentrate on how the paragraph is organized):

In 1927 John Livingston Lowes alleged that parts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, published in 1796, quietly reappear in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, which was written the following year (Lowes 1978: 148, 545). Lowes’s suggestion has set the agenda for much later discussion. My own paper, written from the theoretical perspectives of feminist post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, places Coleridge’s plagiarism within the field of sexual politics and the politics of desire and power as they are played out in Romantic writing. I propose the thesis that the plagiarism of A Short Residence can be read as an attempt by the male Romantic, Coleridge, to fill in the lack which Lacan argues is the condition of subjectivity.

(p. 140)

This is great – in a short space, Moore not only sketches a critical context for Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence, moreover one that is specific to the themes she wants to discuss in her own essay; she also tells us what her approach is (feminist poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis), and what her essay adds to the debate on Wollstonecraft. In a few deft moves, Moore informs her reader and engages his or her attention with the promise of an interesting discussion. By making her aims and objectives clear, she also gives her reader a map or compass by which to navigate the rest of the essay. Moore hasn’t kept back her best point as some ‘prize’ for the assiduous reader to discover; she hasn’t treated her essay like a detective novel, where the ‘solution’ is withheld until the last page. Rather, she uses a direct and economical mode of address to communicate from the outset all the information the reader needs to get the most out of the essay.

The introduction is all about setting out your stall – about letting your reader know what to expect, and telling him or her where you are coming from critically. So, let’s assume we’ve been asked to write on images of solitude in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poetry. We’ll use ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and ‘Resolution and Independence’ as our texts, and work up a thesis that solitary figures are closely associated with the psychological impacts of rapid social change in the late eighteenth century – anxiety and alienation. (Again, don’t worry if you don’t know the poems; just focus on how I organize my ideas.)

In 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, a volume of poems that eschewed ‘lofty’ neoclassical themes in favour of situations drawn from the lives of rural labourers, ‘idiot boys’, and ‘female vagrants’. Lyrical Ballads appeared at a time of intense and rapid social change, when traditional jobs and ways of life were vanishing. Seemingly overnight, many people became virtual anachronisms in their own age. This essay explores Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s interest in isolated characters such as the Leech Gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’, the Ancient Mariner, and the culturally marooned Simon Lee, and suggests that for both poets, solitary figures are striking emblems of alienation and disempowerment.

Well, this introduction might not win awards, and would be much improved if I could find a quotation from a literary historian corroborating my view of the frightening pace of social change in the late eighteenth century (accompanied by a footnote, of course). But that notwithstanding, in the passage I tell the reader what my essay seeks to do, make clear my interest in relating literature to the historical period that produced it, and manage to come up with one or two nice turns of phrase (fifteen years after the first edition of this guide, I still like ‘solitary figures are striking emblems of alienation and disempowerment’!).

Internal coherency

Read through the paragraph again. Notice how one point moves smoothly and elegantly into the next, in a logical sequence. This sequence, if broken down into units, looks something like this:

• 1 Lyrical Ballads differed from previous volumes of poetry by placing new emphasis on ‘lowly’ characters such as labourers and vagrants.
• → 2 Text appeared at an historical juncture characterized by rapid social change, when many traditional jobs and ways of life were disappearing.
• → 3 Essay focuses specifically on how Wordsworth and Coleridge use solitary figures to explore the plight of those left stranded in those uncertain times.

If the order of the units were rearranged, the introduction would no longer be as effective. Actually, it is a good idea to apply this ‘internal coherency’ test to your own introductions. I’ll be looking at another example of this test a little later.

Useful phrases

One more thing to note. In the last sentence of my introduction, I’ve used a simple and very convenient phrase for outlining the scope of my essay:

This essay explores …

Other ways of saying the same thing are:

In this essay, I wish to investigate/consider/detail …
This essay examines/demonstrates/contends/proposes that …
This essay seeks to determine …
This essay concentrates on …
My discussion draws into focus …
This assignment reflects on …
My concern in this essay is with …

When you come across pithy phrases or expressions in the work of good critics, don’t be afraid to ‘lift’ them for your own use. The chances are that the phrase in question has already been adapted from someone else. Don’t lift ideas, though. That’s plagiarism, and you’ll suffer for it.

By the same token, there are certain phrases or formulas it’s best to avoid as you would the plague. For example:

In order to respond to the question, it is first necessary to examine Dudley’s position in the Elizabethan court.

I’m sure many of you will recognize the in order to do X, it is first necessary to do Y formula. It probably seems like an old friend who’s always there for you, through the proverbial thick and the proverbial thin. But while it may be a mainstay of sixth-form essays, it has no place in undergraduate work. It is just too clunky, predictable, and obviously ‘A-levelly’. As soon as you fall back on it, the words ‘No imagination!’ will begin to flash in your tutor’s mind in thirty-foot-tall neon letters.

Express yourself

Before we move on, I’d like to look at one more exemplary introduction, this time from Peter Marks, ‘Monitoring the Unvisible: Seeing and Unseeing in China Miéville’s The City & The City’, Journal of Surveillance Studies, 11 (2013). (The journal is available to read for free online, and I recommend it highly.)

Visibility is central to surveillance, as David Lyon makes plain: ‘Surveillance is about seeing things and, more particularly, about seeing people’ (Lyon 2007: 1). Models based on regimented visibility have underpinned surveillance arrangements and practices, while the titles of Surveillance Studies play on versions of visibility and visualisation: The Transparent Society (Brin 1998); The Glass Consumer (Lace 2005); The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility (Haggerty and Ericson 2006); iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Andrejevic 2007), among...