On Writing Concise Critical Response Essays

As you know, you must write two 1-3 page critical response essays in this course, one due the Monday after October break and the other due the Monday after Thanksgiving break (although you are of course welcome to turn each in before their due dates). What follows here are the requirements for your critical response essays and more general advice on writing short analytical/persuasive essays of this kind. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions.

Requirements

• Format: 1-3 pages (roughly 250-1200 words), with title, your course number, and your name; word-processed; double-spaced; font Times 12 point or similar; preferably laser-printed.
• Due: Mondays after breaks at 5 pm in the folder tacked to the bulletin board outside my office (Fenton 240).
• Texts: The first critical response paper can be on any combination of texts from Cane to The Sun Also Rises; the second on any combination of texts from The Open Boat to As I Lay Dying.
• Process: At least a week before you turn in each of your papers, email me as specific a sense as possible of what question you're considering and what your approach to answering it will be, so that I can offer advice on your question and approach. After you hand in your essay, I will try to get comments back to you as soon as possible, and you may rewrite the essay for credit in light of those comments.

1. At the most general level, in your critical response essays you must present an argument about or offer an interpretation of at least one of the texts we've read in class. You should have a central question that you are trying to answer in your essay, and you should be working to persuade your audience that your answer is plausible by offering whatever evidence seems most relevant to your argument and audience.

2. When considering which question(s) to write on, keep in mind some of the central issues of the course:

• Modern?: In the first section of the course (which provides the subject matter for your first critical response essay), we're considering a bit of the variety of modernist literary projects in the U.S. in roughly the first half of the twentieth century. What makes a given work "modern" or "modernist"? What are the differences between various kinds of modernism--various modernisms--and what may be at stake in those differences? In what way might a given modernist text be a representation of, response to, or registering of the various social transformations taking place in the U.S. after the Civil War and before World War II?
• American?: In the second section of the course (on which you'll most probably be basing your second critical response essay), we'll examine some of the various and often conflicting attempts to define and claim "America," with a particular emphasis on issues of immigration, ethnicity, race, and empire. How does a given writer invent, redefine, reject, or lay claim to an "American" identity? What image of "America" does a given writer present? To what ends?
• Literature?: In the third section of the course (texts from which your second critical response essay may analyze), we'll encounter some of the debates over the social function of literature and discuss how definitions of "literature" were being questioned and revised by writers of the time. What is literature for, if anything? What are the writer's responsibilities, if any? How did writers during the "modern period" answer these questions? Do you find their answers convincing?

Please note that these questions are intended to suggest possible approaches to your essay. Do not feel that you need to answer all or even any of them in your paper. The point of the assignment, after all, is that you generate your own question and think through the most persuasive way of answering it.

3. Because the paper length is so short, compression and conciseness are key. You should try to pack as much into this small space as possible. But don't bite off more than you can chew--it should be possible for you to answer the question you choose within the page limits of the assignment. This means that you have to choose your question particularly carefully, as well as rank the evidence for your argument so that you focus on the most telling moments in the text. Finally, you must be particularly ruthless about syntax and diction--make every word count, and cut or revise any words or phrases that aren't doing important work for your argument.

Advice

Note: I've numbered the paragraphs in this section to correspond to the numbering in the previous section.

1. The best way to make sure you are making an argument or offering an interpretation is to generate questions that you have about the texts we've read, choose one, and set out to answer it for yourself. You should choose a question that's interesting to you and that you believe you can show to be interesting to your classmates (the audience you should imagine for your essay). Moreover, you should choose a question that's truly debate-able, a question to which you can imagine several possible answers. Your job is to sort through the possibilities and convince your audience that your answer is the most plausible.

Much of this sorting process will take place before you ever sit down at a keyboard or desk to compose your answer. You should reread the story(-ies) you're writing on, mark significant passages, write questions or observations in the margins, take notes, brainstorm, make up lists or charts, doodle, try to produce an outline, free write--whatever "pre-writing" process works best for you at getting your interpretive juices flowing.

When you move on to the drafting and rewriting stages, remember that a key part of persuading your audience that your answer is plausible and your evidence is relevant is anticipating how they might react to your answer and evidence. By imagining possible objections or counter-examples and then either explicitly or implicitly forestalling them in the written essay, you show your audience that you are taking them seriously and that you have thought carefully about the question. It's much more persuasive to deal with a major objection or counter-example to your argument than to pretend it doesn't exist. In fact, one of the best ways to make your own thesis stronger is to try advancing a thesis that contradicts yours. Some people find this process of imagining counter-evidence and counter-arguments more helpful to do early in the pre-writing stage, others when revising their first draft. Find out what works best for you by trying out different approaches this semester.

You will most likely find that you need to write a first draft of much longer than three pages in order to a) figure out precisely what your main argument is and b) figure out how best to convince your readers of the plausibility of your argument. Therefore, it is in your best interest to give yourself time to not only write that longer first draft but also to go through a serious re-vision process--to select, prioritize, reorder, condense, and cut in light of putting your ideas as clearly, concisely, precisely, and persuasively as you possibly can. The upshot of this is that you should never, ever, decide not to pursue a line of thought in writing because doing so will take you over the page length. Follow the idea where it takes you. Most experienced writers don't write their first drafts with a set blueprint in mind--they generally discover what they mean or change their minds while writing. Worry about page lengths only after you've thought through the issue in writing to your satisfaction.

2. You should choose a subject on which you have a number of observations that you can string together or distill into a coherent argument or interpretation. Above all, choose something that interests you and on which you feel you have a perspective that's distinctive. Try to bring to our attention something that you've noticed about the text to which you feel that the group as a whole hasn't paid sufficient attention.

Whatever question you choose, you should be able to say why it is important. The more you think about this, the more effective your introduction and conclusion will be--you will be able to answer the "so what?" or "why should we care?" question with which most readers approach every piece of writing.

3. On conciseness: Pay particular attention to topic sentences and transitions. Cut to the chase and don't repeat yourself unnecessarily. Develop your own personal voice and style of analysis and persuasion. The only thing your introduction must do is "hook" your readers and make them want to read the rest of the essay (this is usually done by giving them some sense of where the rest of the essay is going or what the point of the essay is). The only thing your body must attempt is to persuade your readers of the plausibility of your answer to your central question. The only thing your conclusion can't do is restate your thesis. Your conclusion should "shift gears" in some way, approach your answer from another angle or discuss what follows from it. In short, be aware of the form and structure of your own writing: think about what points you want to make in what order--about the most effective way of ordering your essay so that it helps you persuade your audience of your point's validity.

In general, then, think of the critical response essay as a more formal reading response, in which you don't just make an observation or two and come up with some questions, but instead choose a specific question to focus on in some depth and think carefully about how you're going to go about answering it and persuading your audience of your answer's plausibility. I will be grading the critical response essay in terms of how well you make your case for your argument or interpretation of a text or texts.

EN 336: Modern American Literature, Fall 1998
Last modified: 10/7/98, 10:44 am