How to write exam essay

HOW TO WRITE AN ESSAY

1. What is an essay?

. An organized collection

. of YOUR IDEAS

. about literary texts

. nicely written

. and professionally presented .

In other words, the essay must be well structured (i.e. organized) and

presented in a way that the reader finds easy to follow and clear: it must

look tidy and not present any obstacles to the reader. It must have a clear

readable interesting style. But, above all, it must consist of your ideas

about literary texts. This is the centre of it: this, and this only, gets

the marks. Not quotes from critics, not generalisations at second hand

about literary history, not filling and padding; your thoughts, that you

have had while in the act of reading specific bits of literary texts, which

can be adduced in the form of quotations to back up your arguments.

2. Why write in this way?

2.1 Learning how to write professionally

In the English Department you learn how to respond to literary texts.

This is an interesting and worthwhile thing to do, but unless you become a

teacher of English remarkably few people in later life will be interested

in your thoughts about Jane Austen. What they will be interested in (I'm

talking about potential employers now, but not only them) is your ability

to talk, to think, and to write. This part of the course is where you learn

to write: professionally. The guidelines that follow tell you how to do it,

or rather how to learn to do it.

They set a higher standard than is usually asked of a first year

undergraduate essay in this Department. This is for the following reasons.

(1) I think it's my job to offer you the best advice I can, not to tell you

how to get by. (2) If you learn what these guidelines teach, you will get

better marks in all the essays you do from now on until finals. You will

surprise the markers with the quality of your presentations, by producing a

better quality than they expect. (3) You will learn a skill, a not-very-

hard-to-learn skill, that will last you for the rest of your life.

3. Collecting the material

The first task is to get the material together. The material comes in

two kinds: primary and secondary sources. Primary sources in this case are

literary texts: the actual material that you work on. Secondary sources are

works of criticism. Here is your Second Important Message:

(ii) It is always better to read an original text and refer to it than

to read and refer to a critic.

The more literary texts you read and can refer to the better. You can't

possibly read too many. Remember, the key to your essay is the number and

quality of your ideas about literary texts. If you casually refer, from at

least an apparent position of familiarity, to some obscure literary text,

you will win the admiration of your marker. If you refer to a critic,

particularly an obscure one, the chances are his or her eye will glaze

over. There are exceptions to this rule, which I will mention later, but

the basic principle is extremely important: original texts are better than

critics, and you can't know too many. Whereas it is possible to get a first

class degree and never to have read any critics at all.

3.1 What are critics for?

The short answer: to be disagreed with. A longer answer: reading

critics can give you an idea of what the state of critical opinion is about

a literary text, to save you re-inventing the wheel and coming up with some

brilliant original perception that William Empson thought of sixty years

ago. Reading critics means that you can start at the coal face rather than

have to dig your own mine. Secondly, they can stimulate your ideas. But the

thing to remember is: only your ideas obtain merit. Therefore, never, ever,

quote a critic just to agree with him or her. Always, under all

circumstances, quote a critic in the following form: Leavis says x, but I

disagree as follows. Or: Leavis says x, and this is very true, but I would

develop his thought as follows. Never, NEVER: as Leavis says, followed by a

quote, followed by nothing. This is very common in undergraduate essays,

and it is simply a waste of space.

3.2 Books and articles

A secondary point about critics. They publish in two forms, books and

articles. You should be familiar with the library electronic catalogue and

the ways of searching it, in order to find books: it's not difficult, and

if you don't know how to do it by now go immediately and find out. If you

have a problem, ask a librarian, they'd be happy to help. Just spend half

an hour simply playing with the library computer, finding out what it can

do. But: books are not usually much use. They're usually out, as you will

surely have discovered by now. And you gain no special merit points for

having read them, because so has everyone else.

Articles are a different matter. Articles in academic journals are (a)

not normally read by undergraduates, and therefore (b) normally on the

shelves. They are more work to track down, but success will be rewarded by

the admiration of your examiner, because undergraduates aren't expected to

know about such things. And they are full of interesting, original, and up-

to-date ideas about literary texts, that, maybe, your examiner won't even

have heard of (but don't count on this: stealing ideas is heavily

penalized). Also of dross and garbage, of course. But this is good too,

because you'll have plenty to disagree with.

The way to get hold of articles is to go to the library and play with

the CD ROM workstation. There's one on every main floor. I can't tell you

here how to work it: find out, it's not difficult, and, as before, a

librarian will be glad to help you; also there are copious instructions.

Spend some time playing with it: the database you want is called the MLA

Index. You will come up with a lot of titles that aren't in the library,

which is very frustrating, but from every search you will find at least a

few relevant articles, and some of these will be valuable. This is almost

guaranteed.

Note: this information is now out of date. There is a wonderful database

called BIDS that lists articles published since 1981. It's on the Web; it's

easy to search, very user-friendly, and it emails you the list of articles

you are interested in. Remarkable. You need to go to the equally friendly

Information Desk in the Main Library to get a login and password first.

3.3 Using the World Wide Web

The Web is rapidly becoming a fantastic resource: easily available,

full of material, and with an an answer to every question. However, there

are problems, and you should use the Web carefully.

4. Reading, making notes, having ideas

When you have found the books and articles you are going to read, you

will need to read them. Here are the golden rules:

(iii) Always carry a notebook

Always read interactively

File and rewrite the notes so you can find them again

Make a bibliography

I will explain. The key is: you are in the business of making a

collection of your ideas (do I have to say it again?) about literary texts.

These can come to you at any time. If you don't write them down, you will

probably forget them. If you do write them down, you will probably think of

some more ideas while you are writing. Write them down too. It doesn't

matter if they don't seem very good: just write them down. Carry one of

those spiral-bound shorthand notebooks at all times, and, if an idea comes

to you, however intimate or urgent the accompanying moment, write it down.

No-one need ever see this notebook, so you need feel no self-consciousness

about what you write in it. This is perhaps the most useful attribute of

the shorthand notebook: it beats the censor. The censor is the cause of

writer's block: the small voice inside your head that tells you that what

you're writing is rubbish. In your notebook you can ignore that voice, and

as a result you will accumulate ideas. Some will be good, some bad; when

you re-read the notes you can sort out one from the other more rationally

than while under the stress of creative writing. Thus the censor has been

by-passed.

4.1 Making notes

The best time to have ideas is when you are reading, either a literary

text or a work of criticism. This is where note-taking comes in. Don't make

notes in the form of summaries, unless you need it to help you remember a

plot (lecture notes are an exception to this): it's normally best to read

the thing again (and get more ideas the second time round). But always,

always, read with a pen and notebook to hand: read interactively. Think

about what you're reading and write down your thoughts. Always. When a

thought occurs under these circumstances it will be in reaction to a piece

of the text at hand: a quotation. Copy out the quote, and a page reference

so you can find it again to check it if necessary, and then put your idea

underneath it. If you tie the idea in with the quote in this way, then your

ideas will always be text-based and close to the concrete life of the text,

as Leavis might possibly have said.

Always write one idea and one idea only per page of the shorthand

notebook. Why? So that you can file them. Once a week go through all of the

notes that you've accumulated during the week. Take them out of the

shorthand notebook: tear them out, or remove the spiral. You put headings

on each note, throwing away the dross (the obvious dross, that is: dross

can turn to gold if left to itself for a bit). Rewrite if necessary; make

more notes if more ideas occur. Then file them in a way that you can find

them again. Make sure you know where all the quotes came from: editions,

page numbers, and so on.

4.2 Bibliography

For this you need a booklist, either computer-based, or in the form of

a card index. A bibliography, some call it. Every book you read should have

its details listed in your master book-list, your card index or computer

file. Author/s, title, date, publisher, shelf mark, place of publication. I

repeat: every single book and article you read should be in this list. In

(only) two and a bit years' time when you are desperately trying to find

something original to say about The Book of the Duchess for an exam that is

going to happen in a few weeks' or days' time, you will need this booklist

and these carefully filed notes, containing your ideas about literary

texts. Believe me.

5. Planning and structuring

So: you've gathered the material, read it, made notes, had ideas,

written them down on separate slips, headed and filed them. How do you

write the essay?

Like this. You gather together all of the slips you have on the topic

of the essay. You read through, writing new ones and rewriting old ones if

more or different ideas come to you, and making sure each of them is

headed. You put the headings together in a logical order (headings, sub-

headings, sub-sub-headings) on a sheet of paper in the form of an outline

of the essay. You arrange the slips in order of the outline. You assemble

the pile of slips, the outline, and blank paper (or a blank word-processor

screen) in front of you. You write the essay, going from heading to heading

and slip to slip. The essay writes itself, painlessly, because you've done

most of the thinking already. On the way, you observe the following rules

and wise bits of advice.

5.1 The outline

The plan you construct should be in the form of an indented outline.

This is a series of headings and subheadings, indented, like this:

Main heading

subheading 1

notes on subheading 1

subheading 2

notes on subheading 2

and so on...

Behind every essay there must be a plan of that sort. This essay on

essays is built from such a plan, as you can see. If you remember any

lectures that use outlines, you will (I hope) remember how useful it was to

have that written out in front of you so that you knew where you were in

it. Now think of an examiner, having to read up to a hundred student

essays. A decent level of concentration is hard to maintain. They get lost,

and lose the thread, just as you do in lectures. It is essential therefore

that an outline like that must be obvious to him or her, clearly

perceptible in the way the essay is written. In order to achieve this

effect the easiest way is to have one, written out for your own benefit

beforehand.

5.2 The paragraph

The second thing, in order to maintain and make obvious a clear

structure, is to be aware of the nature of the paragraph as the basic

structuring unit in the essay. Basically, every paragraph should represent

and flesh out a heading or sub-heading in the outline. The paragraph is the

building block of the essay. Therefore:

. It should be at least a third to half a page in length, but not too

long or the reader will get lost. No one-sentence paragraphs! They

give the impression that you read the Sun a lot. It's not good to give

that impression.

. It should have what's known as a topic sentence, near the beginning,

that announces the theme of the paragraph. The paragraph should not

deviate from this theme or introduce any new themes.

. The first sentence should somehow be linked to, or contrast with, the

last sentence of the previous paragraph.

. The first paragraph should announce clearly the theme of the essay. I

prefer first paragraphs that quite baldly say "I am going to do this

and that in this essay". (Some don't, however). In the first paragraph

also you should define your version of the title and make it clear. If

the marker knows from the beginning what you are going to do, s/he can

bear it in mind and be aware that you are sticking to the point and

developing it, because s/he will know what the point is.

. The last paragraph is not so important. You can proudly announce that

you have fulfilled the aims of the first paragraph, if you like, or

you can just end: it's up to you.

But the main thing is to make each paragraph a solid unit that develops

a clearly announced sub-theme of the essay. This way the indented outline

that's behind it will be obvious (not too obvious: don't write subheadings

before every paragraph) and the marker will not have that terrible lost

feeling that immediately precedes giving the essay a low mark in disgust.

6. Presentation

Behind everything I've said so far there are two themes. One, just to

repeat it yet one more time, in case you might have formed the idea that I

don't think it's important, is: your ideas about literary texts are what

matters. The other is this:

(iv) Always put the reader first.

Up to now, most of the writing you've done has been for people who are

paid to read what you've written. They have no choice: they have to do it.

After you leave here, most of the writing you will do (in the course of

your working lives) will be writing you are paid to do for other people.

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