Critical Essay: Requirements, Expectations, and Advice
As you know, you are required to write a 4-to-6-page analysis of the narrative strategies of a particular writer and work from the first unit of the semester. This page gives advice on drafting and editing thesis-driven paper; for the assignment sheet for the critical essay, click here.
General Requirements
1. In the options listed on the assignment sheet, 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. I encourage you to choose the option that you find most interesting, not necessarily the one that you think will be easiest to write or be most likely to earn you the highest grade. The latter results are more likely to follow from starting with the former, as writing on a topic you're interested in means that you'll be more willing to put in the hard work of generating an argument and making it as persuasive as possible over several revisions.
3. Because the paper length for your critical essay 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(s) in question. 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. However, this kind of revision for conciseness should take place only after you have fully explored your ideas, the best ways of communicating them, and the best means of persuading your audience that they are true/plausible. First get your ideas down, then put them as effectively as possible, and only then revise for length, precision, and conciseness.
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. This process is especially important for the "compare and contrast" options--you should use comparing and contrasting as a tool to help you generate observations, which can then lead to a question that you can then try to answer. 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 paper. You should reread the text(s) 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!
2. You should choose or develop a topic on which you have a number of observations that you can use to generate and provide evidence for 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 story to which you feel that the group as a whole hasn't paid sufficient attention.
Whatever question you choose or invent, 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 I care?" or "why does this matter?" questions with which most readers approach every piece of writing.
3. You will most likely find that you need to write a first draft that is longer than the page limit 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.
One consequence of the need for conciseness is that you may find that you need to rethink the "five-paragraph" essay structure you were probably taught in high school. (You know: the kind where you have a "funnel"-style introduction in which you move from a general observation to your specific, three-part thesis statement; a body consisting of three paragraphs of "evidence" for each of the three parts of your thesis, complete with topic sentences that restate each part of the thesis and a transition into the next paragraph's topic sentence; and a "reverse-funnel"-style conclusion that restates the thesis and takes it from the specific to the general.)
Although you should definitely hang onto the key elements of the five-paragraph essay--an introduction, body, and conclusion; a main argument; some kind of topic sentences and transitions; a sense of structure; and a consideration of evidence--you should definitely avoid the "funnel" and "reverse-funnel" styles of introduction and conclusion and absolutely avoid needless repetition. Cut to the chase. 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 shouldn't do is formulaically restate the thesis or move from the specific back to the general (as if your read is going to forget in 4 to 6 pages just what it was you set out to prove!); instead, your conclusion should "shift gears" in some way, approach your answer from another angle or discuss what follows from it. Above all, 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 argument's validity.