From research to writing
Writing essays is a central element of your work in languages, one that draws on all of the knowledge and all of the skills that you will acquire in the course of your degree. It is in itself a process of discovery.
What is a critical essay?
A critical essay is a means of advancing an argument, of making and justifying claims. A critical essay is shaped by and engages with existing knowledge of the material on which you’re working. A critical essay is objective and responsive all at once. A critical essay is always well documented, using the relevant style conventions. A critical essay is an exercise in persuasion more than it is the rehearsal of a personal point of view.
The essay as genre
The essay is a literary genre… The practice of writing is intrinsic to cultural debate and the essay is one of its central genres. Many influential writers on literature and culture rely on the essay as a means of intervening in contemporary society.
The essay is also a scholarly genre that informs and persuades. It combines information and argument, evalation and research. Because it draws on these distinct kinds of work, essay writing is your means of participating in informed debate. Writing, therefore, implies research and research implies immersion in sources, both primary and secondary.
Your essay, because it draws on primary sources, and on critical treatments of these, is like a scholarly work, and an important feature of the treatment of sources is that it is always explicit in literary essays.
Good writing
Because essays are as a rule relatively brief, they are often examples of writing that is at once polished and forceful. Good writing implies revision, refinement and dialogue: your own essays will form part of your debates with your teachers.
Research and sources in the essay
Research will form part of your work. Your essay is researched and written with a specific focus in mind, as defined by the topic on which you choose to write. This is what gives your essay its primary purpose — to give a thoughtful, engaged and engaging account of a specific set of issues. In your research as well as your writing, it is important always to ensure that what you have to say remains relevant to the topic. Make sure that you use reliable sources, especially secondary sources that are accurate as well as relevant.
An essay demands close reference to your primary sources. One of the important skills that you will acquire is to recognize just what elements of the text are relevant to the topic and that allow you to develop your own response to it. This is where you should make precise and telling references to specific parts of the work (always giving page references when you do so).
Quotations
There will be occasions when it is appropriate to quote from a text. For instance, you may want to discuss a particular passage closely, in which case it is useful to have the text in front of you and your reader. But remember that a quotation of itself does not necessarily demonstrate a point and make sure that the purpose of a given quotation, short or long, is always clear.
Quotations take a number of forms. An inline quotation is a brief extract from a source which is given in quotation marks, either within a sentence or introduced by a colon. A block quotation is a longer extract — more than forty words or so — and is again introduced by a colon, and presented as a separate indented paragraph.
Get your references right
In any academic work, you are expected to document your sources. This is the reason why it is important when doing your research to take careful note of the information, explanations, ideas and arguments on which you wish to draw in your essay. Your essay should always include references in the form of a footnote, and a complete list of all of the sources on which your argument depends in a bibliography at the end of your essay.
Quotation and citation
Be explicit in referring to your sources. Direct reference must always be made to a source on which you rely for information, explanations, ideas or arguments. In the case of quotations, this practice should come very readily to you, as you are making direct use of a source. There will also be occasions when you will cite a source without quoting from it. In these cases too, you must always include direct references to any source on which you rely for information, explanations, ideas or arguments.