Essay Writing Basics

	It may seem silly for me to begin with a definition of essay writing, since all of you have written essays in the past.  However, it may serve many of you to have a few basic principles laid out, to have some perhaps erroneous assumptions corrected, and to even have a few good ideas repeated.

	The phrase “essay writing” contains an interesting dichotomy that we do not really think about: the “essay” is a product, while “writing” is a process.  In this course, I will be emphasizing the process over the product, as it is my belief that if students see the essay as something which develops over time, and as the result of a number of distinct but related activities, their essays and grades will improve.

	First, the essays you write for this course are pieces of analytical and interpretive writing that present a multi-faceted argument or discussion to an informed reader.  You need to keep the tone of your writing somewhat formal (avoid clichés and colloquialisms: e.g.“The monster sticks to Victory like ugly on an ape” or “Victor is a real idiot”) and refrain from judging the work under consideration (“In short, Shelley offers a very good description...” or “Had Joyce made Gabriel more likeable, this story would have been much better.”).  Analyzing, arguing, interpreting, and judging are very different things, and you should always avoid the latter in your work.
Introductions

	Many students assume that the introduction should open the discussion by moving from a very general point to its specific application within the work under consideration.  It is common for me to read essays that begin “Since the beginning of time, people have fought each other.” or “Love is the most important thing in the world.”  These are very weak introductory sentences, partly because they could introduce any essay (and are therefore overly general and vague) and also because they are truisms (that is, opinions that are so commonly accepted or self-evidently true as to not even need stating).  In order to help students focus their arguments more clearly, I recommend that you begin your essay with some form of the sentence “In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein...” or “James Joyce demonstrates the sometimes debilitating desire to be accepted by others in “The Dead.”  Mention the work itself, and your particular interest in it, in the very first sentence of your essay.

	If the first sentence of your introduction mentions the work and your overall interest in it, then the final sentence of your introduction -- your thesis statement-- gives the reader some details regarding your overall argument, and also predicts (literally “to say before”) the major points of your essay.  You need not begin, in fact, you should not begin, with some wordy and cumbersome phrase like “In this essay, I will show....”  Such phrasing is called “self-reflexive” because the essayist has stopped talking about the work of literature itself, and has started talking about his or her own essay.  Although you may not be able to avoid all self-reflexive constructions, you should at least try to edit them out of your essay: they are wordy and off-topic.

	Self-reflexive structures should not, however, be confused with simple personal reference, which you have all been told is inappropriate in formal writing, but which, in fact, can be very strong.  You are not only permitted, but encouraged, to use “I” in your writing when it seems very strong to do so.  For example, if you are writing about Clarissa Dalloway’s relationship to Peter Walsh, you may want to say something like “I think Peter attempts to belittle and manipulate Clarissa because she becomes a reminder of all of his failures.”  The “I” is appropriate (and strong) here, because the interpretation you are offering is, strictly speaking, unsupportable by simple recourse to the book (that is, there is no single passage to cite to support your point), but it is a very interesting and valuable insight, and should be stated in the strongest possible language.  You need to contrast this use of “I” with something like “I read the novel when I was very tired, and did not appreciate the symbols in it” which is a very weak use of the personal reference because it draws attention away from the work instead of offering a very strong interpretation of it.

	Now that you have a sense of what thesis statements should not do, I will offer some brief comments on what they should do.  A thesis sentence needs to provide your reader with a kind of a map of your overall argument, and also provide some sense of how the more specific things you look at in your essay fit into it.  Earlier, I referred to the essay as offering a “multi-faceted argument” and in your thesis statement you should mention the various parts of the whole:

Eg:

“In “The Love Song,” Eliot uses allusion and symbolism to define the classical hero, and repetition and enjambment to redefine the hero as a subject of modern alienation.”

(Now I would expect four body paragraphs in this essay: one on each of the devices mentioned above.)

Is much stronger than:

“Eliot uses a number of literary devices in order to redefine the modern hero.”

(I don’t know what to expect in terms of the structure of the essay.)

Which is stronger than:

“Eliot uses a number of devices in this poem.” 

(I already knew that, and do not really expect greatness from this essay.)

While I try to refrain from general rules, I will say that any thesis statement that has not been rewritten after the essay is finished is not going to be as effective as it could be.  You only know how the various parts all fit together after the essay is completed, and can therefore only give the strongest sense of the argument to come after you have written it.

Topic Sentences

A topic sentence is the first sentence of a new paragraph, and introduces the argument that will be pursued in the paragraph that follows.

A topic sentence should not:

1. Restate some aspect of the plot of the work:

	Victor goes to university at Ingolstadt.

If the point of your paragraph is that Victor behaves selfishly towards Elizabeth in the novel, then you should begin the paragraph by stating this idea:

	Victor shows his selfishness in a number of different ways.  He assumes that Elizabeth will wait for him as he satisfies his intellectual desire, and does not recognize that she has a similar interest in education.

2. Revert to an overly general point that you have revised out of your introduction:

	Love is very mysterious, and happiness is fleeting.  Victor learns these two important lessons in the novel.

3. Present information as if you are simply running through a disconnected list of things:

	One thing that Victor does is take Elizabeth for granted.

All markers and instructors have their prejudices and pet peeves, and this, surely, is mine.  I dislike reading essays where the writer is only approaching the topic in terms of a few things that he or she just has to get on paper and get submitted by the deadline.  Take some time to think about how things might fit together in your essay, and offer some sense of that relationship in each topic sentence.  As an example, see the transition between the first and second paragraphs under “introductions” above:

If the first sentence of your introduction mentions the work and your overall interest in it, then the final sentence of your introduction -- your thesis statement-- gives the reader some details regarding your overall argument, and also predicts (literally “to say before”) the major points of your essay.  

The only thing a topic sentence should is the following: 

Offer an interpretation or argument about the work that is a part of the overall argument presented in your thesis statement.  For example:
	
	Despite his desire to be accepted by others, Gabriel also wants to be regarded as superior to them.

Here, the writer has offered an argument about the work that she or he will go on to support or expand upon in the course of this paragraph.  Presumably, this topic sentence is one aspect of the larger argument presented in this essay about Gabriel and his relationship to others.