A critical essay should not just express an opinion. It must advance an argument.
Often you will have been offered by a title - or discovered in your research - some crucial proposition on which you can centre the entire structure of your essay, examining the relevance and accuracy of that one claim. Your essay may eventually come to a concluding sentence which says little more than 'Yes, I do agree' or 'No, I do not'. Which of these destinations you choose to reach, though it should concern you, may not matter much to your reader. The route, however, certainly will.
Notice the sleeping metaphors of a journey in clauses like 'advancing an argument exploring an issue', 'arriving at a judgment'. You should conduct your reader along a carefully planned path. The route must take in all the most interesting points and yet maintain an overall sense of direction. Good essays make progress.
Sensible essay-writers, like all competent guides, are properly equipped before they embark. They have clear priorities, and have allocated the time available to the different landmarks so that the more 'puzzling can be adequately explained, and the most interesting sufficiently explored. They have chosen the order in which these points will be reached, and the linking passages which can best connect them into a demonstrably logical itinerary. They also, of course, know the conclusion to which they will finally lead the reader; but they remember that to travel illuminatingly is more important than to arrive.
These strategic issues must all have been examined and resolved before you set out upon your first sentence. There you will be accompanied by your reader who will already be expecting guidance as to what is worth noticing and why. You must have a plan.
All critics do, of course, discover more about the text and their own thoughts as they write. While you are striving to find the best words with which to explain one point, you will often be alerted to some new idea. Then you may quite rightly decide to adapt your original structure so that your latest thoughts can be included. However, the more thought provoking you find the actual process of writing, the more essential it is to have already committed yourself to an overall design. You can then see whether what has just occurred to you does belong in the paragraph which you then happen to be writing. It may belong in a much earlier or later one. It may even deserve a paragraph to itself. If so, you must have a planned sequence so that you can see where the new paragraph can most logically be inserted.
Before you begin to compose any part of your essay, write out in note form the main points you mean to make. Add cross-references to relevant passages in your full notes: to passages that offer more detailed evidence with which to define and support each proposition or those which offer more extended summaries of the arguments involved. Revise your ordering of your main points until you are satisfied that you have found the most illuminating and persuasive sequence in which to lead your reader through them.
If this process proves so difficult that it threatens to consume a great deal of time, ask yourself whether you are ready to design a plan and to write your essay. It may be that you still need to do more reading, thinking and note taking.
Throughout that earlier stage of researching an answer, you should have been wondering how many issues your essay can explore, and how they relate to each other. As your reading led you to ask one question, you will have been trying to see whether an answer to it must depend on other problems which need to be resolved first. Conversely, you will have been wondering, once you have decided on how a given issue should be resolved, whether that answer in itself provokes other questions. You will also have been curious, as more and more topics and ideas occur to you, as to whether each of will, in the last resort, matter more or less than others. So, the time you come to write out a plan, many of the relevant policies should already have emerged, and only need to be recorded in a sufficiently centralized and economical format.
Writing out such a summary should certainly clarify your scale of priorities and may usefully trigger some additional ideas. However, its main use at this stage is to allow you to see all the insights and arguments that you have produced earlier and to order them into a suitable structure.
Your plan will, of course, codify the distinguishable topic that you mean to investigate, and outline the kinds of information that you intend to deploy. You obviously need to clear about what and how much you can probe in the available space. You do need to commit yourself to sounding we informed, which here will usually mean sounding well-read. However, not all those who are well-read read well. Check that it does not just list subjects but also summarize your opinions. Where it notes passages of the text that you intend to cite, make sure there is some note as to the significance you intend to claim for them. Anticipate a reader who whenever you observe some specific feature of a work, will as 'So what?' The propositions that your essay will advance need to be spelt out in the bald note form of your plan. Then you seize this last chance to check that they do reflect your beliefs or, at the very least, that they still seem to you both tenable and interesting.
Narrowing the scope
You may find that your first version of a plan is committing your essay to attempting more of the available tasks than can be performed well in the space available. Many essay titles ask too much. They allude to so much literature in such vague terms that an answer could grow to book length without distressing. You will often have to limit the range of your own relatively brief essay.
This process of selection will, of course, have been in your mind from the moment that you first began to read and make notes. Now you must make your final decisions, and some may seem bitterly wasteful. Whole areas of debate which you have pondered may have to be excluded. Whole texts on which you had made notes may, after all, have to remain unmentioned. A large idea or localized observation which had seemed to you so innately interesting that you looked forward to including it in your essay may turn out to be irrelevant to your planned argument and have to be discarded.
The relationship between this selection of your material and your strategy for arranging and ordering it needs to be flexibly reciprocal. If you find that many of your favorite quotations or shrewdest comments are having to be excluded because your intended structure provides no logical place for them, ask yourself whether your plan is right. Perhaps it should be adapted or expanded.
Remember, however, that a shapeless essay, however generously packed with bright ideas and interesting quotations, will confuse and bore your reader. If you try to mention too many works, or even too many specific portions of one relatively long work, you may find that there is space only to mention them. That, of course, is useless. The mere assertion that you have read, however hastily, thirty relevant works will not impress. The demonstration that you have thoroughly explored three will.
Be ruthless. What your essay has room to discuss must be decided rationally now. It must not be randomly imposed later by your simply discovering that you have run out of space and time in which to go on writing.
Weighing the proportions
Some titles and topics may require you to tackle so many different texts and distinguishable techniques that the need for selection has been self-evident from the outset and you have produced a plan which lists your chosen items. You may still have problems in deciding how much space each should be allowed.
There is no right or wrong answer to the question of how many texts or topics should receive sustained treatment and how many must be discussed more briefly. The thoughtful critic is simply the one who sees the problem at the planning stage, and chooses a strategy which is defensible as the least of available evils.
Paragraphing
Each of your paragraphs must of course be centered on a particular issue which is raised by the set title. Each paragraph must be recognizable as a logical next step in a coherently developing argument that directly answers the set question. Nevertheless, in debating the value of including a particular paragraph, you should also ask yourself the following questions:
Will this paragraph prove that I have read one or more specific texts which are demonstrably relevant?
Will it show that I have read observantly? Will it contain specifics which only an attentive reader would have noticed?
Will it explain clearly that I have thought about the implications of what I have read and their effect upon judgment of the major set text(s)?
If you doubt its ability to perform all these tasks, at least consider cutting the paragraph on the grounds that it might dilute your answer.
You may think that these three questions conspire to enforce, a limiting emphasis on close reading of particular texts. What of the larger issues about literature, and indeed society, which many essay topics raise, if only implicitly? An essay for Critical Theory course, for instance, may need to risk a paragraph which does not even name a single work of literature criticism, let alone demonstrate any close knowledge of it: localized effects. Specific examples may indeed overemphasize the exceptional, and evade important and interesting questions about what all texts in a particular genre or written a particular time have in common. Even on these larger issues, my own prejudice would be to hope for clarifying examples. Nevertheless you - or your teacher - may think that trio of questions are too constricting. If so, you could usefully try to compose one more extra questions to represent other demands which you’ll think an acceptable paragraph might fulfill.

Your essay plan should go to sufficient detail to save you from false strategies in good time. For instance, you may decide that you have titter all, so few interesting points to make about vocabulary and syntax that they should become a single paragraph labeled 'simplicity'. Conversely you might now recognize that the material intended for paragraph 5 is in fact so thought provoking that it can usefully be expanded and divided into two paragraphs: one now labeled 'concrete detail, lists of objects, descriptions of physical gestures and clothes', and another summarized in 'recurrent fascination with economic terms, literal calculations of cash in hand or in prospect and metaphorical use of "profit" and "loss" etc.
Each paragraph must not only have cleanly identified topic. It must also advance at least one major idea. Check that you now understand - and will later, when writing your essay, be able to explain - the precise relevance of each paragraph. Ask not only 'What is this paragraph to be about?' but also 'What am I going to say here and what will that prove in answer to the title's specified question?' Being clear about how each point supports your overall argument will often show you where it must be positioned for maximal effect.
As you begin to make provisional decisions about which paragraphs belong together, check that in a pair which you intend to make adjacent each does make a clearly distinct point. Points may deserve separate paragraphs because they concern different, if related, issues:
Paragraph (a): the portrayal of God in Paradise, Lost Paragraph (b): the portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost.
These characters are active opponents in the work's narrative structure and direct contrasts in its dramatized ideology. They are thus sufficiently distinct and yet so mutually defining as to deserve separate but adjacent paragraphs. .
Conflicting views of the same issue can deserve separate paragraphs too. You will usually be able to see that some paragraphs might be grouped together as aspects of the same broad topic. But thinking in terms of "Vaguely defined large divisions can do more harm than good. It provides the false security of thinking you have planned an argument when you have actually done nothing more intellectually strenuous than slicing a cake. You may, at worst, think terms only of the fit: lf of your essay and the second.
To turn mere grouping into persuasively logical argument, try to rephrase your noted heading for each group of paragraphs so that an inert description of subject is enlivened into an assertion of opinion.
Ideally, each group, like each of its component paragraphs, should be a necessary prerequisite of the next. By establishing one point you earn the right to proceed immediately to the next.
Systems for sequence
The most effective order will almost always emerge through thought about the particular problems which have occurred to you during your research on each essay's specific topic. If, however, you cannot think of an appropriate structure, some version of one of the following systems may serve. Be sure to adapt it thoughtfully both to the precise demands of any set question and to your own judgment as to what criticism should seek to achieve.
THESIS, ANTITHESIS, SYNTHESIS
Sometimes your essay can be ordered into a debate between two potentially accurate readings. You can consider the case for and against an author or text whose importance is disputable. You can investigate the evidence for two rival interpretations. You can weigh the relative advantages of two divergent approaches to see whether, for instance, an evaluative historical analysis is most helpful in what it reveals and leas costly in what it suppresses.
A judicious weighing of the arguments on both sides will usually lead to some new way of defining their relationship. Instead of a simplistic choice between mutually exclusively opposites you may at least be able to recommend a balance view which can combine the most illuminating aspects of both ideas. At best you may be able to construct a quite distinct third notion which redefines both.
An answer which conducts a debate should not simply divide into two halves where a single proposition is defended remorselessly until a midway switch to equally consistent attack. The case for and the case against should recur after enough space to ensure that your reader remains aware of both possibilities. On the other hand, if they alternate too rapidly each point will be made so briefly before giving way to some counter-argument that it will sound superficial.
One compromise is to subdivide an essay into three or foul sections each of which offers its own thesis/antithesis/synthesis pattern. You deploy this pattern for each section of an argument rather than just once for the essay as a whole.
If you are weighing so many controversial issues, the desirability of regular attempts at synthesis is uncertain. To follow the pros and cons in each case with a summary which merely reiterates some already established balance is useless. Do not indulge in: 'Thus it can be seen that sometimes Dickens chooses a setting because of its potential for humor and sometimes because landscape or architecture can be used for serious, symbolic purposes.' Such a method will merely impose a whole series of flaccidly vague conclusions throughout your essay. The final paragraph's inherent risk of imposing just one is quite sufficient.
A merely summarizing synthesis is not worth a sentence. You should rely upon your detailed arguments to have implicitly made clear where the balance of probability lies. But a complicating synthesis which establishes some new relationship between thesis and antithesis can maintain progress and may be worth a whole paragraph.
PROPOSITION AND PROOF
You may believe so strongly in some thesis about how all author or work should be read that you cannot argue the antithesis with any honesty. The unconvinced sound unconvincing; so sometimes both integrity and expediency may require you to plead for one side throughout your essay. The opposition must of course be demonstrably considered; however, you perhaps regard its arguments as so feeble that you cannot devote to them an equal share of your essay. To do so might waste too much effort on mere demolition work, and you may think that constructive criticism is most helpful to you and your reader. It will usually be the texts and not misleading or irrelevant accounts of them.' that your essay means to expose.
Any assertion which you have found in the title and which seems to you overwhelmingly true can form the backbone of your essay. So can any view which you yourself have defined in researching an answer. Whatever its origins you must redefine and complicate the proposition that you intend to support. Your structure must separate it into a number of more specific possibilities. One of these should have been offered before the end of your first paragraph. Establish its exact implications, its relevance and its credibility. Then use it to raise the next possibility and set about confirming that.
Ask yourself in each case: would this paragraph make any less sense, or be any less persuasive, if its argument did not follow the point made in the previous paragraph? Does the previous paragraph establish a view which I need the reader to have understood and conceded before I can explain and prove my present claim? If the answer is 'No', try again.
ORDER OF COMPOSITION
You may some time be faced by an essay title which forces you to structure your entire answer according to the chronology in which a series of texts was composed. Far more often you will meet titles which merely seem to do so.
The danger of ordering your material around the order of composition is that it is, so soothingly easy. It may distract you from the effort of deciding your own priorities. It may sap curiosity as to what is the most convincing sequence in which to explain your ideas. Where the question explicitly demands an interest in such chronology you must, of course, ensure that your essay constantly examines the relevance of that factor. Its significance, however, can seldom be lucidly debated in an essay whose own structure slavishly follows the order reported by literary historians. Their facts must be used to stimulate and support your own ideas.
Beginnings and endings
Someone may have told you that essay structure can rely on the simple formula of 'introduction, middle and conclusion. In practice this leads some students to concoct a first paragraph which just announces their intention of writing an essay, and last which merely claims that they have done so. The entire, task of answering the set question and saying anything useful about the appropriate text is thus left to the intervening paragraphs. If these have been assembled according to the subtler principle than that enigmatic concept of a 'middle' they will be as shapeless and inert as a stranded jellyfish.
Forget 'introduction' and 'conclusion' until you have worked out a rational sequence for the main body of your essay. It is here that you will have the most interestingly difficult problems of discrimination and sequence. How do you keep each major topic or idea sufficiently distinct for the reader to any given moment just what is being examined or advanced? How do you, while keeping that present subject clear, ensure that the reader understands its dependence on what has been established earlier and its purpose in relation to what is yet to come?
If you solve these problems with sufficient care and cunning, you may find that you have designed a structure not just for the so-called 'main body' of your argument but for the entire essay: to add an introduction and conclusion would be superfluous. Of course, there are legitimate uses to be made of introductory and concluding paragraphs. Faced by an unusually complex topic or an ambiguously phrased title, it may be necessary to devote a first paragraph to identifying problems and clarifying issues. So, too, there may be cases in which you feel it would be too frustrating to abandon your essay without a suggestive final paragraph to indicate how, if you had space and time to explore more texts or other controversies your argument might develop.
Opening paragraphs seem particularly prone to platitudes and irrelevances, so it may be that you should force yourself to begin with a firmly stated idea which forms the first stage of your argument. You may, instead, be in the habit of offering information about a text's historical period, or the life of its author, or the new taken of it by some famous critic. The effectiveness of a factual opening will depend on your motives. It may be that you are merely trying to postpone facing the real challenge. You just feel nervous. Ideas feel risky. Facts, however irrelevant to the set question's specific demands or your eventual answer’s chosen strategy seem relatively safe. If you are merely doodling your way into an appropriately courageous state of mind, doodle on a separate sheet of paper, not n the first sentences of your essay.
You can test whether your introductory facts are just doodles by asking yourself these questions. Has the fact which I am about to offer been chosen carefully from a sufficient range of candidates? Do I understand how it is relevant to the title and why it is itself unusually throughout provoking? Will my prose immediately explain what that relevance and those thoughts are?
Of course, texts do exist in contexts. Facts about the society that produced them or the ways in which they have been subsequently processed to color the modern reader's approach may by crucial. Nevertheless, you cannot yet hope to be as well informed on some areas as your teacher is. So a factual opening may have the inherent disadvantage of stating only what your reader already knows. If so, it will delay however momentarily, you’re offering something which the reader does not find tediously familiar: the first of your own original thoughts. Another popular ritual for limbering up before the essay makes any pretence of performing its specific task, is a generalized claim to be thinking:
The statement made in the first essay title certainly raises some important issues.
In order to discuss whether this quotation is appropriate or not it is necessary first to decide exactly what it means can only be resolved after careful consideration of some specific passages.
There is no quick and easy answer to this question which truly considerate critics keep such musings to themselves. At an early stage of reparation, they start thinking in more precise terms, defining exactly what the 'Important issues' in this case are, and choosing the' specific passages' which will be most illuminating. What they later share with the reader in an opening sentence is a stimulating idea about just one of these issues or passages. Their essays begin not by asserting thoughtfulness but by demonstrating it in the careful definition of a particular thought.
You can usefully aim for an opening idea that is so peculiarly apt to the set question's demands that, unlike the weak examples above, it could only be used to introduce the specified topic. But first sentences which just restates the title are useless. That is the one piece of information which your reader indisputably has in mind already, having just read it at the top of the page. Here is a question followed by the opening of a feeble answer:
What is there in the poetry of the 1914-18 War besides decent human feelings of outrage horror?
To suggest that first World War poetry is merely used a vehicle to express outrage about the long-drawn-out war and to depict with horror the anguish of battlefield limits the works to being little more than protest poetry and anti-war propaganda.
Here the title's concepts are regurgitated rather than discussed. Some terms are simply repeated ('outrage', 'horror'). Others are translated by synonyms which may sound like variations but actually add no clarification or challenge ('1914-18 War' into 'First World War'). There is no attempt to probe the precise implications of the title's own chosen terms; to expose any hidden premises which these may contain; or to identify problems raised, but not explicitly stated, by the question itself.
Wasting even a portion of your opening statement on re-statement makes a poor first impression. If asked 'What is William Morris's view of the role of literature in political reform?' do not begin: 'In determining William Morris's view of the role of literature in political reform, it is imperative that we should remember'. Do not repeat the title's demands. Begin your response.
Perhaps the most popular of the exercises which may warm up the shivering writer, but eventually chill the reader, is a statement of intent. Here the first paragraph is devoted to summarizing what the rest of the essay will seek to prove. Thus views which may later be interestingly and convincingly argued are at first just asserted. Generalizations which later paragraphs could be going to test and qualify by analysis of specific evidence are first offered as glib banalities. Texts which the essay might eventually explore in detail and discriminate thoughtfully are merely listed; this reveals little more of the writer's ability than knowledge of their titles.
First impressions must influence the reader's response in a critical essay as in any other text: Still, you may have fond memories of some novel even if you warn your friends that it makes a rather slow start. So make a special effort over your opening but do not fret about it disproportionately. Do try to find an immediately interesting point to make at the outset and do take extra trouble over its phrasing. Nevertheless, concentrate most of your efforts upon most of your answer. If that answer maintains a high enough quality of substance and structure, throughout the lack of a dazzlingly perceptive opening will not much trouble your reader or diminish what you have taught yourself by writing the essay.
Endings, with a few obvious adaptations, should be constructed on the same principles as those which I have just outlined for beginnings. Merely winding yourself down and out of the intellectual effort should be as private as the preliminary winding yourself up and into that properly productive mood. The general claim that you have been thinking like the claim that you will be can be no substitute for specific thoughts. Reminding the reader of the essay title should be even more superfluous by the end of your answer than it was at the beginning.
A merely summarizing conclusion is likely to be repetitive and reductive. Like any paraphrase, it is likely to do an injustice to the subtlety and complexity of the text which it seeks to abridge. You will often find that what you had planned as your penultimate paragraph should in fact be the last. If it establishes the final point of your argument, it will probably make a decisively detailed resolution which some more broadly-based summing up would only dissipate.
Admittedly, the position of your closing sentences gives them unfair advantage in any struggle to change your reader's mind. What has been most recently read tends to be most vividly remembered. So an undisciplined examiner may be excessively impressed by a final flourish or give a disproportionately low mark to an essay which falters right at the end into uncharacteristic clumsiness. Most examiners, on most occasions, however, can be relied on to read well. That means reading all of a work with equal attentiveness. Do end as wittily or thought provokingly as you can. Remember, however, that no localized spit and polish here will put a shine on an otherwise dull essay. If in doubt, begin your essay no earlier than the beginning of your argument and, as soon as that argument is complete, stop writing.