Facing the question
This chapter will be of most use when you have been given a specific question to answer. But even when you have been asked simply to 'write an essay on…', you should find help here. Some passages- will prove suggestive, as you try to think of issues that may be worth raising. Others will show you how these can then be further defined and developed.
Decode the question systematically
If you just glance at a set question: and then immediately start to wonder how you will answer it, you are unlikely to produce an interesting essay, let alone a strictly relevant one. To write interesting criticism you need to read well. That means, among many other things, noticing words, exploring their précis implications, and weighing their usefulness in a particular context. You may as well get in some early practice by analyzing your title. There are self-evident advantages in being sure that you do understand a demand before you put effort into trying to fulfill it.
Faced by any question of substantial length, you should make the first entry in your notes a restatement in your own words, of what your essay is required to do. To this you should constantly refer throughout the process of assembling material planning your answer's structure, and writing the essay. Since the sole aim of this reformulation is to assist your own understanding and memory, you can adopt whatever method seems to you most clarifying. Here is one:
Write out at the top of the first page of your notes the full question exactly as set.
2) Circle the words that seem to you essential.
3) Write above each of the words or phrases which you have circled either a capital 'S' for 'Subject' or a capital' A' for 'Approach'.
4) Place in square brackets any of the still unmarked words which, though not absolutely essential to an understanding of the title's major demands, seem to you potentially helpful in thinking towards your essay.
5) Cross out any word or phrase which, after prudently patient thought, still strikes you as mere grammar or decoration or padding.
Here is an example from English literature that is to be applied to essays from other areas;
'We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them (Middlemarch). Discuss the function of metaphor in George Eliot's work.
This might become:
['We all] of us, grave or light, get our [thoughts] [entangled] in metaphors [act) [fatally] on the strength at them [(Middlemarch)]. Discuss the function of metaphor in George Eliot’s work.
The choices I have made here are, of course, debatable.
For instance, some of the words that I have crossed out may strike you as just useful enough to be allowed to survive within square brackets.
Deciding how to mark a title will not just discipline you in noticing what it demands. It should reassure you, at least the case of such relatively long questions, that you can already identify issues which deserve further investigation. It thus prevents that sterile panic in which you doubt your ability to think of anything at all to say in your essay. If you tend to suffer from such doubts, make a few further notes immediately after you have reformulated the question. The essential need is to record some of the crucial issues while you had them in mind. Your immediate jottings to counter future writer's block might in this case include some of the following points, though you could, of course, quite legitimately make wholly different ones.
KEY-TERM QUERIES
These notes may look dauntingly numerous and full, considering that they are meant to represent first thoughts on reviewing the title. Of course, I have not been able to use as economically abbreviated notes as you could safely write when only you need to understand them. Nevertheless, you could obviously not write as much as this unless you already knew some of the texts. Even if you are in that fortunate position when first given a title, you may not want, or feel able, to write so much at this very first stage of the essay-preparation process. Nevertheless, you should always be able to find some issues worth raising at the outset so that, when you embark on your research, you have already jotted down some points that may be worth pursuing.
You may later decide - as you read and think more - that some of the problems that first occurred to you should not be discussed in your essay. Even those confirmed as relevant by growing knowledge of the texts will need to be defined far more precisely and fully before you think about composing paragraphs.
Notice too that in a number of cases the issues have emerged through wondering whether any of the question's terms might have more than one meaning. Investigation of ambiguity can often stir the blank mind into discovering relevant questions.
Terms of Approach
You may spot easily enough the keywords in which a title defines your subject-matter but terms prescribing how this is to be approached may prove harder to find. Often they are simply not there. Essay-writing should, after all, exercise your own skills in designing some appropriate style and form in which to define and explore a given literary problem.
Even where a title's grammar is imperative rather than interrogative, you will usually have to decide for yourself how the topic should be tackled. The title may tell you to 'Describe', 'Discuss', 'Debate', 'Analyze', 'Interpret', 'Compare' or 'Evaluate' or for that matter might just put some phrase in front of you to analyze it in your very own terms. In all these cases, you are still being asked questions: what do you think are the most relevant issues here? What is the most appropriate evidence which needs to be weighed in investigating them? How should that evidence be presented and on what premises should it be evaluated?
When your essay title uses one of the above imperatives, you must not assume that the demands represented by the others can be ignored. Many students are, for instance, misled by titles which tell them merely to 'Describe' some feature of a topic. They think this sounds a less intellectually strenuous assignment than one which requires them to 'Discuss' or 'Debate'. They may offer a mere recital of facts rather than an argument about their significance. But the text which you are to describe often is one which your reader already knows intimately. How you approach and assess even its most obvious features may be of interest to your examiner. The mere fact that these features exist will not. Description in a critical essay must initiate and contribute to debate. To 'Describe' is in fact to 'Discuss'. To discuss intelligently is to be specific, to observe details, to identify the various parts which together determine a work's overall impact. So you must' Analyze' even where the title's imperatives do not explicitly include that demand.
Interpretation must, of course, expose its ethical, religious or political value systems which a text implicitly reinforces or subverts. Yet these exist- only in the architecture of its form and in the building materials of in language. What Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for instance, encouraging us to believe cannot be shown by a superficial summary of its plot. Such a summary might be almost identical with that of the original prose version of the story which Shakespeare found in North's translation of Plutarch.
Where Shakespeare's Julius Caesar does subtly deviate from its source, it suppresses some of the basic narrative's latent implications and foregrounds others. So interpretation of just how a particular work seeks to manipulate our definitions of what is true or desirable may also require you to make comparisons. You can hardly have sufficient sense of direction know where one text is pushing you if your map of literature has no landmarks, and includes no texts which outline some alternative path. Thus, even where an essay title does not explicitly require you to approach one set text by reference to another, you are almost 'certain to find comparison useful.
'Compare' - even where it is not immediately followed by 'and contrast' - does not mean that you should simply find common ground between two texts. You must look for dissimilarities as well as similarities. The more shrewdly discriminating your reading of both texts has been, the more your comparison will reveal points at which there is a difference of degree, if not of kind.
Nevertheless, you must wonder what the relatively few works which are regarded as literature do have in common. Your essay is bound to imply some theory as to why these should be studied and what distinguishes them from the vast majority of printed texts.
Student essays sometimes suggest that literature is composed of fictional and imaginative texts, and excludes those which aim to be directly factual or polemical. An English Literature syllabus, however, may include Shakespeare's plays about political history and Donne's sermons while excluding those often highly imaginative works which most of your fellow citizens prefer to read: science fiction, for instance, or historical romances or spy stories. In your essay you should feel free to use references from any source that you may feel relevant.
Alternatively, the focus of your essay may imply that the works which can be discussed profitably in critical prose share alertness to language; that we can recognize a literary work because it appears at least as interested in the style through which it speaks as in the meaning which it conveys. Yet many of the texts which criticism scornfully ignores - the lyrics of popular songs, advertising slogans, journalistic essays - often play games with words and draw as much attention to signifier as to signified. There is now vigorous controversy as to which of the many available rationales - if any - does stand up to rational examination. Recognize the view which each critical method implicitly supports, and choose accordingly.
'Evaluate' may also-be already implicit in each of the other imperatives which tend to recur in essay titles. Description without any sense of priorities would be shapeless and never-ending. Discussion must be based on some sense of what matters. Analysis may involve a search for the significant among the relatively trivial. Interpretation of a text, and even more obviously comparison of it with another, tends to work-however tentatively - towards some judgment as to the relative importance of what it has to say and the degree of skill with which it says it.
Conversely, evaluative judgments only become criticism when they are grounded upon accurate description of the work which is being praised or condemned. If such judgments are to be sufficiently precise to be clear and sufficiently well supported to be convincing, they must be seen to derive from observant analysis of the work's components. They must also show sufficient knowledge of other texts to demonstrate by comparison exactly what about this one seems to you relatively impressive or unimpressive. So, too, they must be based on an energetic curiosity about the overall ideologist pressure which a text exerts as the cumulative result of its more localized effects. You cannot decide whether to admire a text as an illuminating resource or to condemn it as s mystifying obstruction until you have worked out what ways of thinking it is trying to expand or contain. To evaluate, you must interpret.
These interrelated concepts of evaluation and interpretation as the next section explains are more intriguingly problematical than some critics acknowledge.


Short titles may require long and complex answers
Systematic discrimination between a title's crucial terms and its irrelevantly decorative verbiage should allow you to spot the lengthy questions which are merely long-winded and the succinct ones which actually make as great, or greater, demands. Consider, for example, ‘The idea that media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that's about tenth or eleventh on their list’
Titles may tell you how much you need to read
The essay, ‘"O, it is excellent / To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous / To use it like a giant" and "But man, proud man’ may pose the following questions about your reading: have you found any other works illuminating assessing Measure for Measure? Did any other plays by Shakespeare or the contemporaries prove helpful as comparisons? Did any literal work of some other period or genre seem relevant? What critical books or essays stimulated your own thoughts?
At the opposite extreme you might be asked to write a critical appreciation of just one poem like Shelly’s , ‘when winter comes can spring be far behind’ Even when however, you must think out how much reading will be necessary. Some poems cannot be sensibly treated in isolated from others. There are, for instance, poems which were written and published as matching pairs. Browning's enthusiastically erotic 'Meeting at Night' belongs with his cynical sexist 'Parting at Morning' in a carefully wrought confrontation. Even more obviously, a parody can only be evaluated by reference to its target. The notes in a good edition, sufficiently detailed works of criticism, should alert you what else you may need to read.
Even when you have made sure that the named poem des not demand knowledge of others, check that the terms of the question do allow you to concentrate exclusively on the specified work. If, for instance, you are asked to show how 'typical' it is of verse written in its time or how 'characteristic' is of its author, you must clearly demonstrate that you have read enough other poems.
No points, of course, can be scored for having read works which are unrelated to the set topic. You may indeed lose marks because irrelevant knowledge wastes time and muffles clarity. Nevertheless, examiner are bound to favor a student who is sufficiently enthusiastic and interested to have read widely. So where you cannot decide whether a text is sufficiently relevant, come down on the side of discussing it. On balance it is better to be suspected of gratuitous showing off than of laziness.
Remember, anyway, that breadth of reading is only one of the many qualities that your essay may need to demonstrate. Some, misleadingly phrased, questions may sound interested only in what you know. All answers will still need to show how much you have thought, read.