How to write exam essay
HOW TO WRITE AN ESSAY
1. What is an essay?
. An organized collection
. of YOUR IDEAS
. about literary texts
. nicely written
. and professionally presented .
In other words, the essay must be well structured (i.e. organized) and
presented in a way that the reader finds easy to follow and clear: it must
look tidy and not present any obstacles to the reader. It must have a clear
readable interesting style. But, above all, it must consist of your ideas
about literary texts. This is the centre of it: this, and this only, gets
the marks. Not quotes from critics, not generalisations at second hand
about literary history, not filling and padding; your thoughts, that you
have had while in the act of reading specific bits of literary texts, which
can be adduced in the form of quotations to back up your arguments.
2. Why write in this way?
2.1 Learning how to write professionally
In the English Department you learn how to respond to literary texts.
This is an interesting and worthwhile thing to do, but unless you become a
teacher of English remarkably few people in later life will be interested
in your thoughts about Jane Austen. What they will be interested in (I'm
talking about potential employers now, but not only them) is your ability
to talk, to think, and to write. This part of the course is where you learn
to write: professionally. The guidelines that follow tell you how to do it,
or rather how to learn to do it.
They set a higher standard than is usually asked of a first year
undergraduate essay in this Department. This is for the following reasons.
(1) I think it's my job to offer you the best advice I can, not to tell you
how to get by. (2) If you learn what these guidelines teach, you will get
better marks in all the essays you do from now on until finals. You will
surprise the markers with the quality of your presentations, by producing a
better quality than they expect. (3) You will learn a skill, a not-very-
hard-to-learn skill, that will last you for the rest of your life.
3. Collecting the material
The first task is to get the material together. The material comes in
two kinds: primary and secondary sources. Primary sources in this case are
literary texts: the actual material that you work on. Secondary sources are
works of criticism. Here is your Second Important Message:
(ii) It is always better to read an original text and refer to it than
to read and refer to a critic.
The more literary texts you read and can refer to the better. You can't
possibly read too many. Remember, the key to your essay is the number and
quality of your ideas about literary texts. If you casually refer, from at
least an apparent position of familiarity, to some obscure literary text,
you will win the admiration of your marker. If you refer to a critic,
particularly an obscure one, the chances are his or her eye will glaze
over. There are exceptions to this rule, which I will mention later, but
the basic principle is extremely important: original texts are better than
critics, and you can't know too many. Whereas it is possible to get a first
class degree and never to have read any critics at all.
3.1 What are critics for?
The short answer: to be disagreed with. A longer answer: reading
critics can give you an idea of what the state of critical opinion is about
a literary text, to save you re-inventing the wheel and coming up with some
brilliant original perception that William Empson thought of sixty years
ago. Reading critics means that you can start at the coal face rather than
have to dig your own mine. Secondly, they can stimulate your ideas. But the
thing to remember is: only your ideas obtain merit. Therefore, never, ever,
quote a critic just to agree with him or her. Always, under all
circumstances, quote a critic in the following form: Leavis says x, but I
disagree as follows. Or: Leavis says x, and this is very true, but I would
develop his thought as follows. Never, NEVER: as Leavis says, followed by a
quote, followed by nothing. This is very common in undergraduate essays,
and it is simply a waste of space.
3.2 Books and articles
A secondary point about critics. They publish in two forms, books and
articles. You should be familiar with the library electronic catalogue and
the ways of searching it, in order to find books: it's not difficult, and
if you don't know how to do it by now go immediately and find out. If you
have a problem, ask a librarian, they'd be happy to help. Just spend half
an hour simply playing with the library computer, finding out what it can
do. But: books are not usually much use. They're usually out, as you will
surely have discovered by now. And you gain no special merit points for
having read them, because so has everyone else.
Articles are a different matter. Articles in academic journals are (a)
not normally read by undergraduates, and therefore (b) normally on the
shelves. They are more work to track down, but success will be rewarded by
the admiration of your examiner, because undergraduates aren't expected to
know about such things. And they are full of interesting, original, and up-
to-date ideas about literary texts, that, maybe, your examiner won't even
have heard of (but don't count on this: stealing ideas is heavily
penalized). Also of dross and garbage, of course. But this is good too,
because you'll have plenty to disagree with.
The way to get hold of articles is to go to the library and play with
the CD ROM workstation. There's one on every main floor. I can't tell you
here how to work it: find out, it's not difficult, and, as before, a
librarian will be glad to help you; also there are copious instructions.
Spend some time playing with it: the database you want is called the MLA
Index. You will come up with a lot of titles that aren't in the library,
which is very frustrating, but from every search you will find at least a
few relevant articles, and some of these will be valuable. This is almost
guaranteed.
Note: this information is now out of date. There is a wonderful database
called BIDS that lists articles published since 1981. It's on the Web; it's
easy to search, very user-friendly, and it emails you the list of articles
you are interested in. Remarkable. You need to go to the equally friendly
Information Desk in the Main Library to get a login and password first.
3.3 Using the World Wide Web
The Web is rapidly becoming a fantastic resource: easily available,
full of material, and with an an answer to every question. However, there
are problems, and you should use the Web carefully.
4. Reading, making notes, having ideas
When you have found the books and articles you are going to read, you
will need to read them. Here are the golden rules:
(iii) Always carry a notebook
Always read interactively
File and rewrite the notes so you can find them again
Make a bibliography
I will explain. The key is: you are in the business of making a
collection of your ideas (do I have to say it again?) about literary texts.
These can come to you at any time. If you don't write them down, you will
probably forget them. If you do write them down, you will probably think of
some more ideas while you are writing. Write them down too. It doesn't
matter if they don't seem very good: just write them down. Carry one of
those spiral-bound shorthand notebooks at all times, and, if an idea comes
to you, however intimate or urgent the accompanying moment, write it down.
No-one need ever see this notebook, so you need feel no self-consciousness
about what you write in it. This is perhaps the most useful attribute of
the shorthand notebook: it beats the censor. The censor is the cause of
writer's block: the small voice inside your head that tells you that what
you're writing is rubbish. In your notebook you can ignore that voice, and
as a result you will accumulate ideas. Some will be good, some bad; when
you re-read the notes you can sort out one from the other more rationally
than while under the stress of creative writing. Thus the censor has been
by-passed.
4.1 Making notes
The best time to have ideas is when you are reading, either a literary
text or a work of criticism. This is where note-taking comes in. Don't make
notes in the form of summaries, unless you need it to help you remember a
plot (lecture notes are an exception to this): it's normally best to read
the thing again (and get more ideas the second time round). But always,
always, read with a pen and notebook to hand: read interactively. Think
about what you're reading and write down your thoughts. Always. When a
thought occurs under these circumstances it will be in reaction to a piece
of the text at hand: a quotation. Copy out the quote, and a page reference
so you can find it again to check it if necessary, and then put your idea
underneath it. If you tie the idea in with the quote in this way, then your
ideas will always be text-based and close to the concrete life of the text,
as Leavis might possibly have said.
Always write one idea and one idea only per page of the shorthand
notebook. Why? So that you can file them. Once a week go through all of the
notes that you've accumulated during the week. Take them out of the
shorthand notebook: tear them out, or remove the spiral. You put headings
on each note, throwing away the dross (the obvious dross, that is: dross
can turn to gold if left to itself for a bit). Rewrite if necessary; make
more notes if more ideas occur. Then file them in a way that you can find
them again. Make sure you know where all the quotes came from: editions,
page numbers, and so on.
