Writing Tips

General Writing Reminders for Critical Essays:

  • Good essays begin with compelling questions that you genuinely want to pursue
  • Avoid assumptions of author intention.
  • Avoid broad, obvious statements about the nature of life.
  • Avoid clichéd thinking or language.
  • Avoid absolutisms.
  • Quality > quantity.
  • Refer to reader (not audience, unless referring to a film/play/performance)
  • Avoid defaulting to how the reader relates.
  • A good introduction should offer a road map for your reader, with signposts.
  • Your presentation of ideas must be clear, specific, focused, unique, debatable, unobvious.
  • Do not rehash (ideas of) any essay you’ve already written.
  • Organization matters. Find good transitions between paragraphs and hinges between thoughts. Aim for cohesion, the conscious threading together of ideas across your essay.
  • Topic sentences are boring.
  • The mechanical formulaic 5-paragraph essay is not permitted.
  • Title your paper in a way that specifically indicates the subject of your essay.
  • When citing, always introduce & integrate quotes with your ideas; avoid dropped quotes. Block quotes >4 lines. Punctuation goes inside quotation marks.
  • A good conclusion zooms out (but not too far out) to consider the significance of your reflection and to open further questions provoked by your discussion. How is your reader enabled to think newly about some idea that may not have previously been approached in this way? What is the impact of your essay? What are the implications of your reflection? Why should anyone want to read your essay? And more importantly, why should you want to write it? Conclusions should never summarize.
  • Use a writing voice that is authentically, genuinely your own (1st POV is permitted)…if your only way to access this is by imagining casual conversations with friends about the text, insert yourself into a meal (for example) and speak from that place, among that company of people you know well. Avoid rigid, sterile, detached writing voices or styles. Ideally you’ll find a balance of colloquial and scholarly.
  • Know the stakes.
  • Know your reader.
  • Aim for creative thinking.
  • Proofread.
  • Have fun in the writing process. Don’t assume to know everything at the outset of writing. Remain open to discovery, follow curiosities, and give yourself the freedom to express your ideas in as creative a style as you feel necessary.

Poetry-Specific Writing Reminders for Critical Essays (with overlaps):

  • Read the poem aloud multiple times.
  • Altogether, the lines you analyze in depth should be substantial (if drawn from a long poem) or entire (if a short poem).
  • Begin with a compelling question; the answer to this question that you aim to pursue/prove should help you identify and form a clear, specific, focused, debatable, unobvious claim; know the stakes of your argument; imagine counterarguments (though it is not necessary to include them). Consider the speaker’s questions, or the author’s questions as they seem to funnel through the lens/voice of the speaker. These may guide your own questions as readers/writers.
  • Zoom out – what is the poem about, and how does all of the detail you’ve so closely analyzed relate to the overall form/structure/shape of the poem, and most importantly, to broader questions provoked by the poem (which you’ll reflect on in your conclusion).
  • Always address craft – what choices has the author made in assembling the language and structure of this poem, and how do these elements contain/convey meaning? Do not confuse this with author intentionality, which you cannot know (avoid statements such as “the author’s intention”)/
  • Organization matters – do not move through your paper doing a stanza-by-stanza format unless it is significant to address the linear movement of the poem in order to support a specific argument you are making about temporality, otherwise chronology becomes an unnecessary default. Find good transitions between paragraphs; hinges between ideas. Topic sentences are boring. Also try not to direct your reader with confusing locations of lines being addressed (ie.“in the fifth line in the third stanza near the second half of the poem”).
  • Never form a thesis about the existence of poetic devices. Avoid being overly mechanical in the organization of your paper; that is, don’t write one paragraph on diction, one on sound, one on metaphor, etc. Instead try to bring these observations together by organizing around issues of effect and meaning rather than of technique. Where you do point to a device at work, do not simply acknowledge or describe it; discuss how it functions. The analysis expected of you is more than the naming of phenomena (metaphor, synecdoche, enjambment, alliteration); you will need to explore the effects of such devices in the context of the poem you select and in the meaning of the poem as a whole. By “effects” I mean the way these devices shape impressions of the poem’s central ideas. 
  • Avoid descriptions of sensations…The sensation that a speaker (or character in fiction) is, for example, “three-dimensional” or “complex” is just that—a sensation, rather than something that can be argued logically; one might construct an interesting argument about how such a sensation is achieved or why it is significant, but as an argument itself, the mere assertion of complexity or three-dimensionality would fall flat. 
  • Always introduce & integrate cited lines/passages quoted in your paper. Do not just drop quotes into the body of your text and let them dangle. For poetry, there’s no need to include line #s, unless it is a short poem. Do use “/” to indicate line-breaks. Punctuation goes inside quotation marks. Block quote extended passages.
  • Remember: the poem does not argue/express/tell us, etc.; it is not the equivalent of a message, even as it holds a meaning. The poet does not argue (though the speaker may make a rhetorical argument as the figure of the poem), and even if the poem contains an intellectual argument that is rhetorically embedded, it is distinct from what you as the writer-scholar are arguing or examining. The poet does express/convey. The poem does evoke. Be clear on verb usage with such references.
  • The speaker is a figure/character constructed by the poet, even if it is a version of the author’s self; distinguish what the poet does (in craft) from what the speaker does/says as a figure in the poem. Do not assume them to be the same. Do not treat the speakers of poems or the characters in novels as real-life people; they are representational. This also raises the issue of biographical research; treat the poem as an art object, even if all art blurs with life, and only bring in necessary contextual or biographical elements as they guide your specific reading of the poem. This can be a fine line. A poem emerges from a particular context that cannot be ignored, but your reading should not depend on it entirely. (For example, discovering a poet endured the death of a child may help inform your reading of grief in the poem, but you must still be able to discuss how grief is being conveyed in a way, regardless of this knowledge.)  
  • Although you do not want to discuss the value of text as it allows the reader to relate or not, you can consider how the text positions the reader to experience it through certain rhetorical or stylistic moves. This will be an effect of the poem, an effect of how the poet has crafted the poem, rather than an intention of the author. Please avoid conclusions that make statements about the poem eliciting empathy or relatability or accessibility. Also, do not evaluate or praise author’s skills (ie. Frost does a good job of…)
  • Good introductions often begin with detail (not with generalization, universalizing, pontificating, preaching). Begin specific and widen your lens. The best introductions offer a map for the analysis to come. Imagine inviting your reader to walk through the paper. What are the necessary signposts to follow your exploration of an idea in all of its complexity? Use as colloquial a voice as you’d like while maintaining a serious scholarly tone. (1st-person point-of-view is OK.)
  • Overall, avoid broad, obvious statements about the nature of poetry or life. Avoid absolutisms. Avoid clichéd thinking or language.
  • Conclusions are challenging. You want to avoid a repetition of your introduction. Don’t re-summarize the paper; think instead about how the poem – how your analysis of the poem – gets us to think newly about some broader idea; an idea that hadn’t previously occurred or been approached in this way. Brainstorm: What is the impact of your particular reading, what does it open up for us, what are the implications of your argument, why does your analysis matter? Why should I want to read your paper? (And more importantly, why should you want to write it?)
  • You will likely end up scrapping and rewriting your introduction once you’ve finished the paper. Sometimes an introduction is merely a way for you to begin writing the paper you really want to write (which the introduction may not have articulated). Be patient.
  • Have fun in the writing process. Don’t assume to know everything at the outset of writing. Remain open to discovery, follow curiosities, and give yourself the freedom to express your ideas in as creative a style as you feel necessary. What matters to me is also seeing how you find your unique writing voice.
  • Include full name of text (properly cited) and full author name in Intro.
  • Always title your paper. The title should offer a clear lens of your subject and should identify the text/author you’re working on.
  • Proofread. Error-filled work is inexcusable. Remember, this is a first draft, and I will trace the arc of your growth between drafts (emphasis on practice and process, not perfection), but that doesn’t invite an incomplete, hurried, or incomprehensible draft.