A Guide to Writing

Critical Essays
As unlikely as it sounds, a critical essay should be enjoyable to read. It
should engage the reader, draw them into an argument and take them on a
journey. Like the best writing, it should be concise and controlled and
whilst the ideas it conveys may be sophisticated, the prose should be clear
and lucid. The longest words are not always the best! Using the correct
technical term is not simply showing off – it is the most precise way to
convey meaning. Never try to pad out your word-count with unnecessary
waffle. There’s nothing worse than reading an essay in which all the
points are lost in elliptical prose.

The best critical essays give some sense of the writer’s personality and
should certainly convey a personal interpretation. However, whilst
writing an essay is a creative act, it is also an analytical, intellectual form.
Like a barrister in a court of law you can get away with the occasional
rhetorical flourish but you must also support your points with appropriate
evidence and demonstrate technical understanding and analysis of the
relevant systems and concepts.

What follows is an attempt to break down how a successful critical essay

is constructed. It is not the only way and some lucky souls will
incorporate these strategies without really thinking about it. Take the
ideas and the structure and make it work for you – adapt to suit your
learning style.

Enjoy writing essays! If you engage creatively with the text, the task
becomes much easier. You are not, as some suggest, dismembering a dear
friend. Rather you are getting to know the book intimately, finding out
how it works – if you liked the book to begin with, chances are you’ll end
up appreciating it on a whole new level and if you didn’t like it, a broad-
minded critical reading can offer another way of looking at the text which
can encourage a new-found admiration or at least respect for the writer’s
craft, even if you don’t end up loving the work. It’s about a dialogue
between you and the writer in which you need to engage all your
creativity, emotional intelligence and intellect if you are to get the most
out of the conversation.
The Three Stages
Stage One – Planning
Lay the ground work. Read the text thoroughly, research the context. Read some
secondary critical material – immerse yourself in your study of the work. Write a plan
– see below for how to structure this. This plan will vary in detail depending on
whether you are in timed conditions or not, but even in a one hour examined essay it
is worth spending time planning to avoid wasting time scratching your head twenty
minutes in.

Stage Two – Writing

o Once you have your plan, get stuck in to the writing. If it’s a homework task
you don’t necessarily need to write the introduction first. It may be easier to
marshal your ideas once you’ve had time to play around with them.
o Think of your plan as a map to help you get to your destination. It is fine to
stray from the route occasionally, but you mustn’t stray too far or you’ll lose
sight of your destination and lose the good will of your reader.
o Edit as you go. Work out the best order to make points, the most eloquent way
to make a point. If the grammar check throws in a squiggly green line, play
around with your sentence until it goes. Do not assume it’s wrong – it very
rarely is. Watch out in particular for ‘Fragment – consider revising’. This
means you’ve written a subordinate clause which has been left hanging
without a main clause.
o Write in the present tense. You are not telling a story but considering prose or
drama or poetry which still exists.
o Italicise the titles of full works (or underline if you are writing by hand). Use
inverted commas for the titles of poems, short stories or chapters. This helps
the reader to distinguish between for instance Whitsun Weddings, the
collection of poems by Larkin and ‘Whitsun Weddings’, the poem that
collection contains, or between Hamlet the play and Hamlet the character.

Stage Three – Proofreading and editing

It is essential to proof-read work. As you proofread, correct errors and if necessary cut
your prose or develop ideas. This is a crucial stage, but it can be frustrating.
There will be errors which you have missed, no matter how clever you are. It’s a
waste of everyone’s time to hand in work full of unforced errors. Read your work
through, checking that your meaning is clear, your points are supported and evidence
is analysed. If you can’t make sense of your own prose you can bet your life no one
else will be able to. When a teacher marks your work they want to engage with your
interpretation and develop your critical and analytical awareness – their marginalia
will be far more helpful to you if it is discursive rather than admonitory.

Presentation matters – type your work, using font size 12, Times New Roman or Arial
and 1.5 spacing, which will allow your teacher to annotate it. Include a header with
your name and the title and the date and number the pages. Staple your work.
The Structure:
Introduction – Chunk – Conclusion
Introduction
The Intro sets out your argument, lays the groundwork which the essay will expand
upon. It should not be written in the future tense – ‘In this essay I will write about…’
is a particularly dull and long-winded way to start an essay. Get straight into the
immediate response to the question and set out the main components of your
argument, which make up the ‘chunk’ of your essay. Your subsequent sections will
flesh out each premise.

The Chunk
A crucial stage of planning is deciding how to structure your essay. I favour four main
sections, each of which are thematic or based on a specific character or a mix of the
two. These should be quite straightforward categorisations – love, time, nature, death
in Rossetti’s work; Gatsby, Nick, Tom and Wilson for an essay on money in The
Great Gatsby. You may decide to base one section on a close reading of a particular
chapter.

If you can’t thing of four sections, try creating a mind-map of all your ideas on the
essay. Once you’ve got a stack of points, try to categorise them into four sections.

You should not have a chunk on ‘language techniques’ and one on ‘context’ – these
analytical ideas should be woven throughout the whole essay, informing all your
analysis.

Each chunk should be constructed from three or more ‘PEA’s (see below).Sometimes
it may be necessary to top and tail each chunk with an introductory sentence (or
paragraph) and conclusion to ensure the essay flows together. These sentences should
link the section to the preceding one or lead into the next section.

Conclusion
The conclusion draws your ideas together and relates everything back to the question.
Whilst summarising your ideas can be helpful, try to avoid simply repeating yourself.
It can be useful in a conclusion to acknowledge some ideas you have not covered or to
posit an entirely different viewpoint.
The Importance of PEAs
This acronym is at the heart of a decent essay:

Point – Evidence – Analysis

Point
Make a point, posit an idea, a suggestion.

Evidence
Offer some evidence to support your point. In a history essay it might be a historical
event or in geography a case study. In English literature essays it will usually be a
quotation from the text.

Analysis
Demonstrate how your quotation proves the point. This will almost certainly mean
becoming more sophisticated and supplementing the original point with more
information. The analysis can be usefully broken down into different strands:
1 Thematic/Character – this allows you to get stuck into the philosophy of
the writer. What does the quotation reveal about the more universal ideas?
What are the different psychological readings of the character?
2 Contextual – What is revealed about the historical context in which the
text is written or received? What influence does the politics, the culture
and other socio-economic factors have on our reading of the text?
3 Language – The most important factor. This feeds into everything else.
The writer is a craftsman – HOW has he used his tools.
o Grammatical – Syntax: how are his sentences constructed? Diction:
what words has he chosen? Idiolect, colloquialism, dialogue, tone,
narrative voice, point of view
o Figurative – Devices which liken something to something else:
metaphor, simile, personification, pathetic fallacy, symbolism.
o Phonetic – Devices that play on how writing sounds: rhyme, rhythm,
onomatopoeia, assonance, alliteration, cadence, caesura; enjambment.
This is just a taste of the vast array of tools writers have at their disposal.
Looking at the language is like getting under the bonnet of a car and
having a tinker around – finding out how it works and crucially the impact
it will have on a reader or audience. WHY has the writer expressed them
self in this way?

It is not difficult to see what part of the ‘PEA’ requires the most thought and generates
the most creativity in your response. Obviously your analysis is not always going to
cover all of that every time you use a quotation – you want to remain relevant and you
should tailor your analysis to assessment objectives. If there are no points available
for A04 (context) don’t kill yourself looking for historical relevance. But on the other
hand, you should ensure you choose quotations which will allow you to delve into the
writer’s style and demonstrate your understanding of their craft.
Using Quotation
Quotation is crucial to critical essays but is often used clumsily or ungrammatically.
There are two ways of using quotation; you can embed quotations in your own prose
or use a colon after your point then indent your quotation on a new line.

Indented Quotation

In The Big Sleep Marlowe sees the rich cynically, suggesting they are too quick to
forget their roots:
‘The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the
stale sump water or the oil.’
The positioning of their home is a literal representation of their upward social
movement. They have consciously distanced themselves from the low-status
industry on which their wealth is founded. The ‘stale’ stagnant source of their
wealth suggests corruption…

Notice a colon is used to introduce the quotation, NOT a semi-colon. Indented

quotations are particularly useful in coursework essays when you want to use longer
quotations. If you are writing about poetry, the indented quotation allows you to
comment directly on specific poetic techniques like rhyme, enjambment and metre. In
timed essays, however, indented quotations can be time-consuming and you may
prefer to embed quotations.

Embedded Quotation

Marlowe sees the rich cynically. The Sternwoods’ move ‘up the hill’ is a literal
representation of their social ascent. The ‘stale sump water’ which they ‘no
longer smell’ suggests the corruption which their wealth is based on. The
proximity of the oil wells, however, suggests they cannot escape their past…

Here, the ‘PEA’ becomes quite rightly entangled - embedded quotation encourages a
more sophisticated style in which evidence and analysis are interwoven. Over-reliance
on indented quotations can make essays somewhat clunky and rigidly formulaic.
However, if you embed your quotation, your prose must be grammatically correct. A
grammar check should pick up any problems; don’t ignore it. This may mean
changing the tense or the narrative point of view. If you need to change a word, put it
in square brackets:
Marlowe’s conflicted nature is shown when he deals with the aftermath of
Carmen’s departure. As she leaves he tells us he ‘reached for [his] drink and
drank it slowly’, but once she has gone he ‘put [his] empty glass down and tore
the bed to pieces savagely’. The violence of the verbs…
Sometimes you will want to cut a quotation down – again be careful to keep the sense
and grammatical accuracy. To cut a quotation, replace the words you’ve missed out
with an ellipsis in square brackets: […]
The strongest essays will often use both embedded and indented quotation, for every
point deciding whether a longer quotation with close reading in the analysis is needed
or whether a few words to support an ongoing analysis is more appropriate.