Essay Writing

Essay Writing

Bible, John 1.1.: In the beginning was

the Word, and the Word was with God, and the

Word was God.

1 27.02.2013

Essay Writing adapted from Gordon Taylor, A Student‘s Writing Guide, Campbridge, CUP 2009

• Think of yourself as an enquirer.

• New text produces new meaning and new knowledge

• Your essay will be an answer to a problem – not simply a general consideration of issues or facts

2 27.02.2013

Elements of a Relationship

Writer

Object of analysis (content)

Reader

Language

3 27.02.2013

Academic Writing

• does more than simply trying to represent the ‘truth’ about the subject under scrutiny

• establish a point of view

• Assemble the evidence and turn it into a coherent argument

• Clarify meanings

• Address the reader

• Take into account the writings of others

4 27.02.2013

Characteristics of Text

Express your points not as opinions but as justified judgments

Be as comprehensive and thoughtful as possible

Conform to conventions

Your text needs unity. An essay is not an array of sentences or a sequence of ideas but a piece of literature

5 27.02.2013

Basics

• Analyze and discuss, rather than merely to describe • Convert prejudice and opinion into plausible judgment • In choosing our language we are establishing our point of view

• Choose a topic you like • Ask questions of the topic: what is appealing to me, why is it

interesting, why is it important? • Ask questions from different angles: what, who, where, when,

how, why, to what extent, how far, which? • Write down preliminary answers in one sentence each • Elaborate on them in a paragraph

• Clarify terms and explain them

6 27.02.2013

Reading Techniques

• How do you stop your mind wandering off on paths of its own?

– By concentrating less on trying to concentrate and giving your attention to your own part in the conversation.

• How do you take notes more efficiently, so that piles of unused paraphrases do not remain when your essay is complete?

– By constantly interpreting the relevance of what your sources say in the light of your developing argument for the essay.

• How do you read more quickly?

– By first of all slowing down and taking the time to build up a general interpretation of what an author is doing with his text.

• How do you get away from the domination of the writer’s language over your own?

– By putting His/her text away from you and thinking about what he/she says before you make your notes.

• When should you copy an author’s words verbatim into your notes?

– When you find an idea very well expressed or when you find something about it that you might want to put under your interpretative microscope in the essay you are planning to write.

7 27.02.2013

Questions on the Readings

• What is the author’s main aim or motive in writing the work (or the part of it in which you are interested), with respect to what others have previously written on the subject?

• What modes of discourse does the writer employ to analyze the subject matter itself, and how is this carried out?

• What does the writer do to structure his or her analyses into a coherent sequence of ideas?

• How are the parts fitted together in order to compose the whole?

8 27.02.2013

Sources

• Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources

9 27.02.2013

Primary Sources

• consist in the object observed; this has to be interpreted by you and by the writers of your secondary sources.

• Examples: – poem, novel or play studied by literature students – documents studied by historians – the painting or the composer’s score studied by art

critics or musicologists – The ‘raw figures’ or data economists analyze – the survey data of the sociologist – the experimental results of the psychologist

10 27.02.2013

Secondary and Tertiary Sources

• Secondary Sources: monographs, edited volumes of academic articles, articles in in academic journals

• Tertiary sources: the typical course ‘textbook’, encyclopedias, handbooks, etc. – Usually a survey of generally held knowledge in

the field. They tend to be based not on primary sources but on secondary sources, and present much of their information dogmatically as received opinion.

11 27.02.2013

Introduction

• a microcosm of the essay as a whole in which you must at the very least

– give your answer to the question raised by the topic

– give the reasons for your answer, or an indication of the criteria according to which your judgment has been made

12 27.02.2013

Components of Introduction

1. A statement of the issue you propose to examine (importance, relevance or significance). Why? This is your preliminary justification of what the essay is about and why it is worth taking up.

2. A statement of what is known, understood or argued with respect to the issue you are taking up. This can be a brief reference to conclusions that have been drawn, the theories or viewpoints that you find in the literature.

13 27.02.2013

Components of Introduction

3. An indication of any gaps, silences, shortcomings, problems, unresolved disagreements, misunderstandings – whatever is appropriate to your topic – in what is being said by others. This move typically begins with a ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘however’, etc.

4. A statement of what you propose to do in your paper to fill the gaps, make something else heard, solve the problems, resolve the disagreements, correct the misunderstandings, etc. etc. This will usually take the form of setting out the argument you will be putting forward and indicating the kind of conclusion to which you will come.

14 27.02.2013

Components of Introduction

5. An explanation of how your paper will go about achieving this. This can be a reference to the method or approach you are using.

For a short paper, all of this might be achieved in three paragraphs; for a longer paper you might need two or three paragraphs to deal with just one of these moves, depending upon its importance and complexity within the scope of the paper as a whole.

15 27.02.2013

Middle Part

• Shift of emphasis away from bald propositions and conclusions towards the careful working-out of arguments and the balancing of interpretations with the evidence you call upon to support them.

• To justify the case presented in your introduction is to develop arguments, to deploy evidence, to evaluate the strength of counterarguments and apparent counterevidence, and to demonstrate their relevance to the question with which you began.

• Your aim is to show not so much that the answer you have decided on is the right answer, but that it is a reasonable point of view to hold.

16 27.02.2013

Middle Part

• Defend, concede, refute, or reconcile arguments

• Explain, define, describe or compare phenomena

• Generalize and interpret or base interpretation on facts you have described

17 27.02.2013

Problems and Solutions

• What if you are not so sure about your initial propositions any more?

• No disaster – unless you have left the writing until a minute or two to the twelfth hour.

• First, convince yourself that you really have changed your mind. If this doubt is not too great, it might be possible to accommodate it in the conclusion to your essay .

• Secondly, having decided to change your case, you need to re-write your essay. This does not mean, however, that you must begin all your work from scratch.

• It means that you will go through what you have written, reinterpreting the facts you have assembled in the new light and modifying the point of view on the arguments set forth.

• Before making any changes, try re-writing the introduction to test whether you have got your new argument sufficiently clear. 18 27.02.2013

Problems and Solutions

• Grinding to a halt

• Re-read your essay and think about it

• Do something else

• A major lexical block is often sufficient warning in itself that you are not as clear about what you want to say as you might have thought; so while a thesaurus may be able to help you out, you might also need to reflect more carefully on the argument of the whole paragraph or section of the essay.

19 27.02.2013

Problems and Solutions

• Writing too much

• learning to write is to learn to select your material from the large amount of it often available and to deal with it as concisely and economically as you can.

• Writing too little

• ask yourself is whether you have done sufficient reading for your essay. Instructors will expect an essay to be reasonably (but not exhaustively) comprehensive in its treatment of the topic, and this can only come from sufficiently wide reading.

20 27.02.2013

Ending

• Aristotle: In the epilogue, you must make the audience well-disposed towards yourself…

• Recapitulate the arguments

• Reflect on what your treatment of the topic has achieved and what implications might flow from your treatment

21 27.02.2013

Language and Tense

• Use of ‘I’: – When you need to make clear to your reader that this is your judgment – When you want to emphasize where you stand in the debate – When you wish to emphasize the confidence in the outcome of your reasoning – When you announce to your reader how you wish to proceed

• Use of ‘we’

– When you report a conclusion which is widely accepted – When ‘we’ includes ‘I’ and ‘you’ (the reader)

• Be careful about the use of passive • Always use past tense and be consistent about this. Present Perfect can be used if

a development in the past continues in the present • Convention: use present tense in texts written by others, regardless of the time.

Example: Max Weber argues; Marx says; The quotation from Marx shows that

22 27.02.2013

Quotations

• Quoting is a way of putting before your reader the object to be discussed, for instance a line from a historical document you wish to analyze. Views and interpretations of secondary authors can be used in much the same way. Quotations may also be used if an author has expressed a view/an issue in an elegant, memorable or significant way.

23 27.02.2013

General criteria for approaching your topic

• What is the relevance of this material for the issue under consideration?

• How reliable is this evidence for the point being made?

• How valid is this evidence or argument? • How plausible is the argument? • How compatible is the argument or evidence for

what we already know? • What are the implications? And how significant is

it?

24 27.02.2013

Do‘s and Don‘ts

• Do use at least ONE primary source for your essay. Use THREE monographs and THREE scholarly articles (journal articles or book chapters)

• Do not quote from obscure, unaccounted, or irrelevant websites

• ALWAYS cite page numbers

25 27.02.2013