You might now, however, be faced by a question which sounds more generalized. Do not be misled. Admittedly, as an advanced student, you should be gradually learning how to offer more sophisticated thoughts about a wider range of literature; but you will also be expected to support those ideas by more skilful use of specific evidence. Sometimes a title's phrasing will be deliberately vague in the hope of provoking you into thinking and writing more exactly. Choosing - and using - the most localized moments in a text may now matter more than ever. So acquire the habit of chanting to yourself, at every stage of essay composition, 'Specify; specify; specify'.
Clarification or proof
To make evident is to reveal. References to particular episodes, lines or words show your reader the text as you see it. By citing examples you explain just what the patterns are that you have spotted.
Evidence can also suggest the means of persuasion, the facts and factors by which a case can be proved. You need not only to explain what your contentions are but to demonstrate that they are rational. Evidence proves that you are not guessing at a distance but responding to words that all can find on the printed page. What your own prose suggests must be shown to be at least tenable.
Should you go further? Should you organize the evidence into proving that your view is not just reasonable but right? Perhaps striving to change your examiner’s mind is good exercise for your own.
There are various conventions which operate here and their relationship is problematical. Most examiners will want you to develop and express your own opinions but many will still deal harshly with an essay which sounds opinionated. An objective survey of available approaches is often welcomed as one ingredient of a student essay. Yet those students who devote the whole of their answer to reporting the views of others are likely to be condemned for failing to think for themselves.
You can present your case as if you were some honestly polemical barrister consistently arguing for one side in an imaginary court of cultural law. Many essays derive. a useful clarity and vigor from trying to convince their readers that one conclusion is true and the alternative false.
You can, by contrast, attempt the objectivity supposedly achieved by a judge when summing up the conflicting evidence. Here all the relevant facts are recalled and discussed. Contrary views of their significance are explained as neutrally as possible. You can try to give some hypothesized jury of reasonable readers the materials on which to base their own decision.
Your own handling of evidence should probably adopt some compromise between candidly partial advocacy and meticulously impartial judiciousness. Any minimally competent barrister understands that simply to ignore the opposing evidence would be counter-productive. It must be acknowledged and weighed with perceptible fairness before being found wanting. Otherwise, the selectivity will be recognized as grossly misleading and the argument rejected. Conversely, the way in which a judge sums up the rival bodies of evidence must in practice reveal some presence. The relative prominence given to particular tact or the certain ways of interpreting them, will hint advice as to which verdict could seem slightly, but measurably, more appropriate.
Extremes are best avoided. Beware of devoting too much of your essay's energy to persuasion as distinct from exposition. You need to reveal the text and to offer sufficient contradictory examples from it. Suppressing all evidence which embarrasses your present contention could blind you to the more fertile complexities and ambiguities which the texts contain. It may thus deprive your reader of what might have been your most interesting observations.
Excessive diffidence can be just as damaging. The neutral balancing act in which you sustain patterns of opposed but equally convincing evidence may seem graceful to you but could strike your reader as frustrating cowardice.
It may anyway be not just undesirable but simply impossible to disguise all your own beliefs about the deeper issues and murkier problems. Limits of space obviously prevent your reproducing every relevant text in its entirety. Yet such transcription would be the only strategy which could achieve strict accuracy. The episodes which your chosen allusions recall and the localized effects which your selected quotations emphasize will inevitably reveal some of your own priorities. Be conscious of this as you wonder what evidence to include. You can thus identify in time the sillier prejudices which must not be allowed, even through such discreet imputation, to infiltrate your essay. Discriminate these from the more thoughtful principles which can be defended and which your essay should more frankly and systematically support.
Quotations
FREQUENCY
Literature tutors, when asked how often a student essay should quote, are likely to wriggle. They may retreat behind some version of that maddening, if honest, non-answer of ‘it all depends.’
If you are in doubt as to whether your essay is in danger of offering too few or too many quotations, err on the side of excess. Most tutors will be less resentful at having to read superfluous extracts from the text than at being required to decode your own prose where, lack of examples has left it bafflingly obscure.
Moreover, copying out quotations, even if some are not strictly necessary to your argument, at least gives you the chance to notice more about their chosen terms and possible implications. So there may well be long-term intellectual gains to compensate for any slightly lower mark on this particular essay. By contrast, composing sentences which are culpably uninterested in a literary work's own choice of language will just reinforce the bad habits of your mind's laziest ramblings.
RELEVANCE AND LENGTH
An essay is an argument, not an anthology. There is no generosity in distributing quotations evenly throughout your essay.
Once you have thus triggered some larger ideas, the process can thenceforward work in the more usual sequence: knowing what you mean to convey, you choose the most useful quotation to clarify and support each point.
A lengthy extract whose significance could be interpreted in numerous different ways may sometimes be essential. You could be arguing that a text's multiplicity of implication often depends on passages where ambiguities proliferate and the reader is compelled to think in many different directions at once. Nevertheless, there will be plenty of other moments where your essay is advancing just one, fairly simple, proposition. Then a short quotation which does not provoke too many other, distractingly irrelevant, ideas is best.
Since quotations should be positioned where they have a precise role to play in advancing your argument, the length of those that you do use must be appropriate. You need to give your reader as many words from the text as are strictly relevant to your present point: no more and no less.
ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY
Choosing relevant quotations is not enough. You must explain their relevance.
Your introductory sentence must not be wasted on repetitive waffle ('Here is another highly interesting example of much the same technique') nor on imprecise praise ('The following lines seem to me intensely moving). What the reader must know, before tackling each extract, is the precise point which it is meant to demonstrate.
Do not let your introduction and your quotation become a single, unpronounceably massive sentence. Only the briefest quotations can be understood if they are lodged as mere components within your own grammar. It is usually safest to end your own sentence with a colon before writing out the quotation and then to begin a new sentence after the quotation is completed.
Follow each quotation with some comment upon its, detailed means and effects. Allow the reader to look first at the passage and reach his or her own conclusions as to whether it does broadly confirm your preceding assertion. Then draw attention to some feature whose significance may have been missed.
Extremely short quotations may, of course, be self-explanatory. If they have been lodged at precisely the right stage of your developing argument, the applicability of the few words that they contain will often need no further demonstration. Most of your quotations will, however, be long enough to admit of varying views as to which words matter most. Your own opinion on this should be clear. Invite the reader to notice some specific choice or arrangement of words. Explain why it interests you and how it clarifies the question at issue.
Few students make the mistake of hurrying straight on from a quotation without any comment whatsoever. Many do, however, tend to make a remark which is too brief and too vague.
Similarly, the precise use of date should be used with great caution. The date of Pope's birth 'in 1688' might have been cut as wholly irrelevant to his works in an essay from his works. Would any poem have had to alter its stance or style in anticipation of a significantly different audience if its author had been born a few years earlier or later?
Alternatively, the date should have been used:
Pope was born in 1688: that pivotal year in British history which seems oddly apt to the poet's later, ambivalent stance. The verse is at once deviant in its protests against, and conformist in its compliments to, the values of the English establishment. In 1688, seven bishops of the Church of England were tried for daring to criticize James II's policy of toleration towards Catholics. Yet 1688 later ushered in 'The Glorious Revolution' when the fleeing James was replaced by the confident Protestantism of William III. Pope, the religiously deviant Roman Catholic and yet politically conservative monarchist, creates verse which commutes uneasily between the almost blasphemous subversiveness of 'Eloise to Abelard' and the virtually propagandist reverence of 'Windsor Forest'.
Neither of these expansions has yet arrived at a quotation from any of Pope's poems. Yet each uses specifics (such as titles, for instance) to turn biographical fragments into the beginnings of a critical argument.