WRITING CRITICAL ESSAYS: A BRIEF GUIDE

Prof. Fallon
In this course, and in other courses you may take in the English Department, you will be asked to
write critical essaysessays that analyze and interpret literary texts. The goal of a critical essay is to
say something original and interesting about the poem or play or novel that youre analyzing. This
can sound daunting. After all, theres no way you can know everything thats been written about
Hamlet or Pride and Prejudice or Mrs. Dalloway. But you will be writing within (and you should think of
yourself as writing for) a particular audience: a community of smart and inquisitive students who are
also interested in the text youve chosen to write aboutyour classmates. What would be new and
intriguing and revealing to them? How can you help your classmates see something fascinating
something not already obviousin your text? The best way to start is to read carefully and to reread even more carefully. Then read again, and again, with a pencil in hand. Mark what catches your
eye or ear: is there anything odd, or confusing, or strange? Do any particular words stand out?
Metaphors or images? Verbal ambiguities or unexpected repetitions? A strong essay will address a
significant thematic or formal question, but it get to an answer by way of precisely observed details.
This document is a brief guide to writing critical essays. What are the features of a successful essay?
A successful essay will make an argument, summarized in a thesis statement, that addresses a real
question or problem in the text youre interpreting. It will support its argument (or claim) with
specific evidence produced through an analysis of the textmost often an analysis that takes the
form of a close reading. (Or, from another perspective, the claim will be discovered through the
process of close reading.) It will explain how the evidence warrants the claim that it supports. It will
make its case in a logical and cohesive form, and it will signpost each step in the unfolding of the
argument.
Lets break down those components. As an example text, well use W.B. Yeatss short poem When
You Are Old:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

CLOSE READING
The term close reading refers to a practice developed by the so-called New Critics, a school of
post-war American literary critics. The New Critics departed from prevailing methods of teaching
and writing about literature; where others relied on biographical information about authors (about,
say, Yeatss love life) or historical background (what does Irish political history illuminate in Yeatss
poetry?), the New Critics argued that interpretation should focus only on structural evidence
furnished by the text itself. To understand When You Are Old, then, one should forget externals
and focus intently on the formal elements of the poem itself. Today, we arent quite so strict. More
recent scholarship has shown how valuable contextual research can be. But close reading is still our

best way of getting under the surfaceof detecting the formal features that give such an apparently
simple poem its undeniably complex force.
Good close reading starts with alertness and a willingness to question your text. Who, we might ask,
is Yeats you? Someone old and greyno, not quite. Someone who will be old and grey, but
apparently isnt yet. (What relation to time and to human mortality does that suggest?) A lover of the
speaker, or at least someone beloved by himor is she? Can we identify the one man as the
speaker? What encourages us to do so? These are two ways into close readingsreadings focused
on the simplest of words, you and when. There are many others. We might pick out an especially
resonant word: pilgrim. What associations does that word carry? Note the compressed metaphor:
Does the idea of religious pilgrimage (or should we instead imagine Puritans sailing to the New
World?) tell us anything about the you of the poem, or about its speaker? Or we might track a key
repetition: the word love, which appears in each line of the second stanza, and thenwithout any
warningis personified in the final stanza. What happens when love becomes Love? Noticing that
change might point us to another: the shift from images of humble domesticity in the first stanza
(nodding by the fire) to the grand closing spectacle of Love stalking through mountains and
hiding among stars. Why this radical shift in scale?
All of this may seem a little scattered. But reading closely is always a little chaoticdoing it well
means being open to surprise, and following unexpected threads where they appear. Close reading is
a form of analysis (etymologically: taking things apart), and you wont know what you want to say in
your essay until you do the work of breaking the poem (or novel or play or essay) down and
examining the pieces. Chaotic, then, but also fertile. Look back at the questions we asked in the
preceding paragraph: each of them raises a genuine question about the poem, and pursuing any of
them could lead you to a fascinating, exciting critical essay. Once youve identified the particular
question you want to ask, you can begin to organize your reading, arranging the details youve
observed into a story about the poema coherent and unified interpretation that answers the question
your initial observations had provoked.
ARGUMENT
An argument begins by setting up a problem: a question that needs answering, an uncertainty that
sticks with you, a tension that you cant quite resolve. A careful, close reading will get you started:
look back at how many questions came out of just a preliminary survey of When You Are Old.
But those questions need to be developed. In order to sustain your readers attention, after all, youll
need to persuade them that the problem your essay addresses mattersyour argument, that is, needs
a motive. One way to establish motive is to connect the key details youve observed to larger thematic
concerns of your text. The shifting uses of the word love matter in part because this is a poem about
love. But they also matter because they can help us see this key issue in a new light: does the
repetition of love in fact suggest an uncertainty in the poem about what love is? A good problem,
then, will speak to something important in your text, but it will also suggest an element of surprise
the promise of a new way of looking at something that other readers might take for granted.
Once youve set up an interesting problem, braced with a compelling motive, you can formulate a
claim that addresses it. Your argument should develop an interpretation (based on the evidence
youve gathered through your reading) that answers the question you frame in your introduction. If
you begin by suggesting that Yeats use of the word love suggests an uncertainty about what love is,
or what it means to love or be loved, then your argument should help us understand what the poem
decides love isor at least why love is so ambiguous in the poem. For example, you might offer a

thesis statement along these lines: In personifying love, Yeats turns it into an abstraction, detached
from actual people who love each other, and thus suggests that true love is ultimately an impossible
ideal.
Note that this thesis is interpretive: it tells us not what love is but what the poem suggests love is. And note
that it connects a specific detailthe personification of loveto a larger interpretive claim. This is a
good strategy in general, because it contains the relation between evidence and interpretation that
should characterize your broader argument. You might rely on the following formula to help you
craft an effective thesis statement (but try to say it with a little more elegance):
By looking at

, we can see

in relation to

X here is your key textual detail; Y is your new insight; and Z is the interpretive issue that your
insight illuminates.
Finally, remember that an essay belaboring the obvious wont keep anyone interested. Your
argument should venture something; it should risk being wrong. In this case, you can easily imagine
someone protesting, No, no, Yeats isnt saying that love is impossible! Hes telling us how painful it
is to lose loveand whats more real than that? The possibility of counter-argument doesnt mean
that you are wrong; it means youre saying something worth saying. Any thesis worth reading and
thinking about is an arguable oneone that someone else could disagree with.
STRUCTURE
An effective introduction and thesis statement provide (among other things) a roadmap for the rest
of your essay. Here, too, you can use the basic form of problem and answer, only now you can tell a
more persuasive and complete story. And you should try to think of your essay as a storya unified
narrative with a logical order leading to a meaningful conclusion. Watch out for the so-called fiveparagraph essay: in this genre, the temptation is to write body paragraphs that deal with separate,
self-contained ideas rather than continuously developing a single claim. Dont confuse the
progression of the text youre writing about with the development of your argument: in our example
essay, the best place to start might well be the final stanza of Yeatss poem. And make sure to
signpost your argument: to make explicit the links that connect one paragraph to the next (how does
a paragraph build on or complicate the previous one?) and to the overall claim. Signposting helps
your reader track your argument; it also helps her see the importance of the local details you discuss.
EVIDENCE
Within the body of your essay, your task is to provide the evidence and analysis that will support
your claim. This evidence comes the close reading of the text that youve already: those details that
you observed in the process of formulating a claim are now the details that will back it up. Its not
enough, however, to simply quote a relevant line from Yeats poem and say the equivalent of: This
proves my argument! Instead, you have to perform the analysis that can reveal the significance of a
piece of evidence. Lets say that you want to argue that Yeats presents love as worryingly changeable.
In order to support the point, you quote parts of the second stanza: your moments of glad grace,
love false or true, your changing face, etc. Now its necessary to explain the connection:
moments, you might point out, but only moments. Maybe unpacking a key word will help: pilgrim
soul implies a journey, with the implicit sense of transformation. And maybe youll add further
nuance to your initial point: each line in the second stanza alludes to change, but dont the latter two
lines emphasize the speakers constancy in the face of change? (A further complication: does the last
stanza then suggest that the speakers own love hid[es] his face?) The point in doing this is to

establish warrant: a solid link between the evidence you cite and the claim that it supports. But the
best analysis will actually model the process of reading and thinking, reflecting (and helping the
reader inhabit) the experience of discovery that close reading generates.
As this suggests, your argument will almost invariably be stronger when you rely on specific
evidence: words and phrases quoted directly from the text. Its tempting to rely on summary or
paraphraseno need to look things upbut its hard to observe anything new or interesting unless
youre working directly on the text.
RESEARCH
Some assignments will require you to include scholarly sourcesacademic monographs, essay
collections, journal articlesin your essays. Sources are scholarly not simply because they are by
professors (though most are) but because they are vetted by scholars through a process known as
peer review. Peer review is intended to catch errors of fact and to uphold standards of argument;
its a form of quality control. Most of the first sources that pop up on Google arent scholarly, and
you shouldnt cite Wikipedia (much less SparkNotes) in a formal essay. Instead, use the library
catalogue and databases like JStor and EBSCOHost, which specialize in hosting academic journals.
Read the sources you find with an eye to grasping the arguments they make. Put the writing process
in reverse: what problem is the article youre reading trying to address, and what claim is it making in
order to address it? Once you have a sense of what a source is saying, youll be able to integrate it
into your own argument. And its important to remember that it is still your essay: when you bring in
outside sources, youre joining a conversation in order to make a contribution of your own. That
means you shouldnt spend large stretches of your essay summarizing your sources ideas; instead,
quote or paraphrase a key idea when it helps you support a point, or when it gives you an idea to
pivot against. (Often its useful to push off of sources: While Fallon emphasizes images of change,
much of Yeats poem depends on images of stability.) Make sure to give full credit to all of your
sourcesincluding ideas that you paraphrase as well as words that you quote.
REVISION
Writing is a messy process. Often its hard to figure out just what you want to say until you reach the
end of a draft; as a result, your ideas can seem to be all over the place. At the sentence level, there
will be plenty of little mistakes to clean up, so its important to go back over what youve written. It
helps to divide this process into three stages:
1. Revise. Revision deals with issues of structure, evidence, and argument. A first draft might not
have a clear thesis; it might change its claim as it goes along; it might not signpost effectively.
After finishing your draftand, ideally, taking a few hours or even a day away from itre-read it
and think big picture. Move things around; be willing to delete and rewrite sections. This is your
change to make sure that the argument works.
2. Edit. Editing deals with the sentence-level details of your essay. Go through your essay again.
Edit partly for clarity: are you sentences grammatically correct, and do they convey their meaning
efficiently? But edit for style, too: does your prose rely on repetitive sentence structures, repeat
words, use a laborious phrases where a pithy one will do? Reading aloud can help you catch
awkward moments and infelicities.
3. Proofread. The last step: read your essay one last time, this time looking for typos, spelling
errors, and other little things that might slip your attention at other stages of the writing process.