Hints to Improve Your Essay Writing – Part Two: Improving the Quality of Your Arguments

Constructing convincing arguments is the backbone of any A* essay.

This piece takes the form of a Q&A and its points can be applied both to exam essays and coursework.

What's the best use of an opening paragraph?

Use your first paragraph to present an overview of the argument which your essay will go on to prove.

Consider the following title: “Critic X claims that Poet Y's work presents a 'hopeless and pessimistic view of the world'. To what extent do you agree?”

Before you begin writing, break that statement down into its individual, constituent claims, for example:

* Is Poet Y's work characterised by hopelessness? If so, how? If not, why not?

* Is Poet Y's work characterised by pessimism? If so, how? If not, why not?

* Does Poet Y's work present anything as broad as a 'view of the world'?

* Has Critic X overlooked any other important aspects of Poet Y's work that undermine her claim?

* Might Critic X have a particular reason for characterising Poet Y's work in this way?

Doing this will improve the quality of your essay for two reasons.

1. You have turned a large, potentially overwhelming question into a series of specific questions that can be answered individually. You can now devote your subsequent individual paragraphs to answering each of the subsidiary questions listed above.

2. You have shown an attentiveness to the precise wording of the question which examiners will credit highly. Lower-scoring answers will assume that 'hopeless' and 'pessimistic' are synonyms but more astute essays will note the differences between them. Low-scoring answers may also not engage with the matter of whether the poems present a 'view of the world'. The lowest-scoring responses, as examiners' reports often complain, will simply list moments when the writer expresses dispirited feelings.

Your opening paragraph might be expressed like this:

“Although much of Poet Y's poems focus on grief, her work is too emotionally varied to be reasonably defined as 'hopeless'. Moreover, even her bleakest work acknowledges the capacity of its protagonists to enjoy powerful and rewarding bonds of love. Her later poems are also suffused with an attentiveness to aesthetic minutiae which suggest perceptive faculties attuned to beauty in a way that is inconsistent with simple pessimism. Additionally, much of her writing, often closely modelled on specific incidents described in her private journal, does not constitute the expression of anything as general as a 'view of the world'. A self-proclaimed champion of the more conspicuously rapturous nature poems of Poet Z (to whom she has compared Poet Y frequently and unfavourably), Critic X seems to have predicated this remark on an exaggeration of the differences between the two authors' bodies of work”.

This opening is clear, precise and engages directly with the limitations of Critic X's opinion. It demonstrates awareness of the poems' methods (their 'attentiveness to aesthetic minutiae') for AO2 and uses contextual details ('her private journal') to challenge the critic's claims, thus fulfilling AO3. It has established an argument so that its subsequent paragraphs can be dedicated to proving these individual points.

(Make sure you know which skill each AO is testing and which are being used to mark your particular essay).

Should I use quotation in my opening paragraph?

It depends on the task. You might want to contrast two alternative critical views, in which case, feel free to quote relevant critics. Similarly, you may know of something that the writer once said which is relevant to your answer. There may equally be a phrase in one of your studied texts which addresses the question's theme directly.

However, you are not obliged to use quotation in your opening paragraph and I would avoid lengthy analysis of primary texts here as you will have opportunity for this later.

Should I define the terms of the question in my opening paragraph?

Your opening paragraph should clarify any potentially ambiguous or contested ideas that the question uses.

For example, if asked to 'analyse the significance of honour in Othello', you should define what 'honour' means since the concept is complex and its meaning varies depending on who is invoking the term. You might argue that a soldier's honour, as exemplified in Othello, entails values of honesty, public duty and willingness to sacrifice one's own interests for a greater good. You could add that, although Shakespeare emphasises Othello's honourable public reputation early in the play, his narrative arc exposes his fragile apprehension of how to embody these three constituent elements of honour in the private sphere. You could also examine the idea that, in the seventeenth century, 'honour' meant something different when applied to women.

However, there are plenty of questions whose wordings do not demand such precise semantic attention. If asked to 'discuss the view that Leontes does not deserve our sympathy' in The Winter's Tale, there's little point defining 'sympathy' in your opening paragraph as its meaning is relatively obvious. However, you could usefully consider some subsidiary questions concerning the complex nature of the sympathy we might feel for Leontes. These might include:

* Is the sympathy that we feel for literary characters a simple matter of those characters 'deserving' that response because of how they behave? Is it not instead shaped by aesthetic decisions taken by the text's writer and the theatrical practitioners who interpret it? (N.B. we should avoid judging Leontes as we might judge someone making similar mistakes in real life.)

* How does Shakespeare's use of language shape our reaction to Leontes' suffering?

* What effect does Shakespeare's shift in focus to the pastoral world of Bohemia in Act Four have on our response to Leontes' suffering in Act Five?

* Do we feel differently about a character whose rash behaviour risked lethal consequences once we learn that such consequences have been avoided?

In general, I recommend asking yourself: 'does defining a term in the question help me answer it more precisely?'

Avoid using dictionary definitions. Dictionaries are records of historical and contemporary usage, not arbiters of words' essential meanings. Consider instead how significant terms or concepts in the question are understood by characters in the text as well as by critics, readers and audiences.

Do I need to evaluate the views of critics?

If AO5 is being tested, you need to 'explore' 'different interpretations' of the text. Examiners will credit a wide range of approaches towards fulfilling this objective. It's therefore likely that you will evaluate the views of published critics although other forms of critical analysis are also credited.

However, when engaging with critics' opinions, make sure that you evaluate their views rather than quoting them to 'decorate' your essay with evidence of wider reading. There's a significant difference between writing 'Critic X notices that Maud seems to resent her brothers' and 'Critic X correctly identifies a repressed resentment of male authority in Maud's idiolect but does not acknowledge that this is evident in her relationships with all the novel's figures of authority, nor that her ability to repress this impulse diminishes as her narrative develops.'

However, exploring different interpretations can also involve other forms of critical activity such as analysing interpretations of ambiguous phrases. In Antony and Cleopatra, for example, you can analyse Antony's phrase 'she's good being gone' either as evidence of his straightforward satisfaction at the death of his wife, Fulvia, or as an expression of fondness for her that he starts to feel having learnt of her death. An actor's delivery of this line is important in determining our understanding of Antony's character.

The exploration of different textual interpretations can also involve: contrasting the ways in which actors have interpreted a particular role in a play; analysing the socio-historical factors that have shaped readers' responses to the text (this is also creditable for AO3); contrasting a writer's own estimation of his or her text with the views of its contemporary critics, and so on.

However, here are two habits to avoid.

1. 'It could be argued that …' - This phrase often indicates critical timidity, implying that its writer is unsure about his or her argument. It also suggests that the writer hasn't done enough research into the text's critical history to evaluate an argument that someone else has actually articulated. If you're tempted to use this phrase, either commit to making the argument yourself or seek out the work of a critic who has made that argument and evaluate it as part of the case you're making yourself.

2. Generalisations about particular critical schools of thought. I've encountered several examples of students writing 'a feminist critic would think...' or a 'a Marxist might argue that...' Feminism and Marxism aren't unified bodies of thought so, by implying that there's such a thing as, say, a typical feminist reader, you are advancing an unhelpful straw-man argument. If you have interesting ideas about the text's representation of gender or social class, construct your own detailed arguments about them, rather than ascribing them to an imagined representative of a particular critical school.

How do I avoid repeating the content of my first paragraph in my last one?

If you're writing an essay focusing on a single text, I recommend finishing it by analysing what readers are left thinking about the ideas in the question as they finish reading the text. For example, an essay on trust in The Handmaid's Tale would do well to analyse how the ending of the main narrative emphasises the intense mistrust that pervades Gilead with the narrator uncertain whether Nick will betray her trust. It would then probably comment on how the Historical Notes shake readers' sense of trust in the veracity of the main narrative, as well as giving us cause to contemplate - and doubt - the trust which we invest in historians as guardians of knowledge about the past.

If, however, you are writing a coursework essay covering several texts, finish by identifying the general differences between the texts' approaches to the theme in the question. For example, say that you were asked to 'analyse the use of form and allusion in Texts A and B'. Your final paragraph might read something like this:

"The reader's likely struggle in negotiating the grammatically complex, allusive form of Text A mirrors the challenges its protagonists face in making sustained commitments to each other. Such a form, its author has noted, is likely to 'deter' those seeking to enjoy it as a conventional Bildungsroman but its ultimate function is to force readers to make the effort to connect to that which resists easy comprehension, a challenge we see the narrator face in her relationships with her adopted family. Text B is, by contrast, less obviously reliant on grammatical and syntactical complexity. However, its frequent use of ellipsis, as both a grammatical and a narrative device, represents temporal discontinuity and emotional disconnection whose function is similar to the formal difficulties which we encounter in Text A. Unlike with Text A, however, the allusions in Text B do not serve to suggest the scope of any one protagonist's knowledge, nor to fragment the narrative, but instead, to indicate its precise historical setting marking the period between late March 1945 and VJ Day. Research into the events of this period allows us to note how knowledge of particular fluctuations in the geopolitical situation exert emotional pressures on a family coping with a grief unconnected to the War. Whereas allusions mark the protagonist of Text A as a learned outsider, the Poole family of Text B draw on common knowledge of the War as gained from the radio broadcasts but their responses to these events are diverse and rarely shared. In both instances, however, the texts' allusions serve to make the reader consider that their protagonists' everyday emotional struggles are shaped by their apprehension of complex situations beyond their immediate concern. For the protagonists of both texts, present reality is experienced through a network of intertextual allusions that exert tacit pressures upon their relationships."

You can see from this, that the candidate has identified a number of general differences between the texts - their relative difficulty to understand, their differing uses of allusions - but has also noted that they use intertextuality for broadly similar purposes. These differences are written about precisely with sustained focus on the reader's response to the text.

I hope that you have found this advice useful. I am always interested in receiving feedback on what I write so, if you have any questions that I haven't addressed here or ideas for future blog posts, please feel free to get in touch.

If you would like to book any tuition, please contact me at swlondontutor@yahoo.com.

I wish you the very best with mocks, coursework and exams.