Читать книгу The Academic Essay DG - Dr Derek Soles - Страница 8

1 Getting Started

One-minute overview: If you are like most students, you begin work on an academic essay immediately, by annotating the assignment sheet containing the list of topics your teacher or professor has given you. You circle the number of the topic that most appeals to you, underline a key phrase or two and make a few preliminary notes about main points to cover and references to check. Perhaps then you put a question mark beside another topic or two that you could turn to if your first choice doesn’t work out. Perhaps in other topics you find information which might provide some insights into the topic you have chosen. This is a good strategy, a good place to begin. Having selected your topic, you then must consider the expectations of your professor, who is, after all, going to be judging your work. What exactly does he or she want from you? Next, you must be clear about the purpose of your academic essay. Why are you writing this essay? What do you want to accomplish? What are your goals? Next, you need to think about your topic, determining especially how much you already know about it and how much more you need to learn.

Finally, you need to compose your thesis, the controlling idea of your essay. In other words, to get started writing an academic essay, you need to:

 consider your reader

 establish your purpose

 think about your topic

 compose your thesis statement

Considering your reader

In the process of researching a subject, synthesising that research, and shaping it into a coherent text, you will learn that subject thoroughly. By writing an essay about a subject, you master it in a way you could not do so merely by reading or listening to a lecture. You learn more efficiently and remember longer knowledge you have expressed in written form.

You don’t, however, write academic essays only for yourself. You write them to display to your professors the extent to which you understand an aspect of the content of a course you are taking. Your professors will read your essay, decide on its worth, and give it a grade. For this reason, it is crucial that, before you begin to write, you consider the expectations of your reader.

Readers influence content

Your primary reader is your teacher. You might share your essay with a classmate, a friend, or a family member and get their input before you hand your essay in. Your professor might show your essay to a colleague or share it with the rest of the class. But your primary reader is your teacher and it is his or her needs and expectations you must meet. In other words, you must match the content of your essay to the needs and expectations of your reader.

Begin by reading the assignment sheet and list of topics with extreme care. Look for terms like ‘describe,’ ‘explain,’ ‘define,’ ‘analyse,’ ‘compare and contrast,’ ‘discuss.’ These are key clues to your professor’s expectations. If your topic is describe and explain the process of photosynthesis, that is exactly what you must do. If your topic is discuss the causes of the First World War, do not compare and contrast the peace settlement of World War One with the peace settlement of World War Two. If you are asked to compare and contrast Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, do not discuss the life of John Keats, except insofar as it might be relevant to the main topic. The first few words of the topic usually identify the focus your professor expects you to take. Successful writers accommodate their reader’s expectations.

Be clear about the required length of your essay, as well. Length will determine the level of detail you are expected to provide. An economics professor, for example, could ask for a thousand-word or a five thousand-word essay on the law of demand and supply; the length would dictate the level of detail you would include in such an essay. You must meet or exceed slightly the required length. If you do not, your ideas are likely not developed in the detail your professor wants.

Finally, clarify any important aspect of the assignment your teacher may not have made clear. Question anything not clear to you: Do you want us to include a plot summary along with our analysis of the story? How many sources do you expect us to cite? Are there sources you would particularly recommend? How many words do you want? May we use sub-titles? The more you know about what your reader wants, the more successful your writing will be.

Readers influence style

Style identifies the manner in which you present information to your readers. If you are sending an email to your friend, your writing style will be informal; your sentence structure might be fragmented; you will likely use slang; you will not be overly concerned about spelling.

The reader of your academic essays, on the other hand, are well-educated and working with you in an academic setting. They will expect you to present your information in a fairly mature and relatively formal writing style. You should not be flippant or sarcastic in an academic essay, nor, at the other extreme, should you be pedantic. Try to strike a balance with a style that is smooth and natural but appropriate for a well-educated reader. Most of your textbooks should be written in such a style and might provide you with a model to emulate.

Readers judge quality

Your friend who receives your email will not judge your sentence structure, paragraph structure, spelling, or grammar. Your professor who grades your academic essay will make that judgement.

Try to find out everything you can about the criteria your professor will use to assess your work. If your professor provides you with a list of the criteria, work closely with it as you write and revise your essay. If your professor does not provide the class with specific information about how essays will be evaluated, try to get some general guidelines at least. Studies clearly indicate that students who understand the criteria on which their writing will be judged write better essays than students who do not know how their teachers will evaluate their writing.

Establishing your purpose

After you have considered the needs of your reader, consider your purpose in writing this academic essay. We write for many reasons: we write a letter to exchange news with friends; we write a poem to express our feelings; we keep a journal to record daily observations.

Academic writing has usually one of two purposes: to provide information which a teacher has requested or to advance an argument about an issue related to the subject you are studying. In other words, academic essays are generally written in either the informative (also known as the expository) rhetorical mode or in the persuasive rhetorical mode.

The informative mode

An informative (also known as the expository) essay presents complete and accurate information about a specific topic. If you are asked to discuss the causes of the war in Iraq or to explain how to treat a victim of a heart attack or to define post structuralism or to compare and contrast Freudian and Jungian methods of treating obsessive-compulsive disorder or to explain the rules of cricket, you will write an informative essay. The purpose of an informative essay is to provide your reader with information he or she has requested or can use. Here is an example of a paragraph written in the informative mode. It is from an essay, which explains to readers how to choose an appropriate bottle of wine. Notice that the information provided is specific and detailed, the result mainly of the author’s use of examples in support of the paragraph’s main idea.

The good host will also know something about the grapes from which wines are made, if he is to make just the right choice for his dinner guests. A wine made from the cabernet sauvignon grape will be rich and deep red and will go best with red meats, especially pot roasts, steaks, ribs, and lamb. Wines made from the chardonnay grape, on the other hand, produce dry white wines that will go well with main courses made from fish, shellfish, poultry, and veal. Wines made from the pinot noir grape will be red, but lighter than those made from the cabernet sauvignon. Pinot noir wines are the perfect complement to barbequed red meat and chicken. The gewürztraminer grape, native to Germany, produces dry white wines with exotic perfumes and are perfect complements to Asian food, Japanese and Thai dishes especially. With a vegetarian meal, a light and crisp wine made from the sauvignon blanc grape, with its wonderful aroma of grass and pea pods, is ideal.

A special type of informative writing, known as the literature review, is an important component of much academic writing. The “lit review” is a component of masters theses, doctoral dissertations, and research studies; it is the section where authors put their own study in context by reviewing related work done earlier on the subject of their investigation. If, for example, a psychologist were designing and conducting a study to investigate the effect of aging on memory loss, she would need a special section of her report to review relevant studies done before she did hers. Here is an excerpt from such a lit review:

Gershin (2001) conducted a longitudinal study to measure memory loss among residents of a nursing home in Cornwall. The study was done over a ten-year period with twenty-three residents who were in their late seventies at the start of the study. Gershin found that there was an average of an 8% memory loss per resident per year over the ten-year period, based upon written and verbal tests that asked residents to recall names of close relatives and famous people. She found, as well, that memory loss escalated as the years passed, so that in the last two years of the ten-year period, the eighteen residents still participating were experiencing a 24-30% memory loss. Westin (2003) got similar results from his five-year study of elderly Japanese nursing home residents, as did Hasslebeck (1999), whose ambitious study involved over a hundred residents of a large Florida medium care facility.

The persuasive mode

The purpose of a persuasive essay is, in part, to present information to your reader but, primarily to convince or persuade your reader that your views on a particular controversial topic are valid and legitimate. If you are asked to discuss the causes of the Iraq war, you will write an informative essay, but if you are asked how you feel about the UK’s involvement in the war, you will write a persuasive essay. Similarly, if you are asked to define post structuralism, you will write an informative essay, but if you are asked if you believe post structuralism is a viable method of literary analysis, you will write a persuasive essay.

Here, for example, is a paragraph from an essay in which the author is attempting to argue that angels are real entities who have been known to intervene in human lives. Notice how the author uses direct testimony to support his argument, an essential strategy for so contentious an argument.

More compelling proof that angels exist comes from reports of personal encounters some fortunate people have had. In an interview in the July, 2003 issue of Event Magazine retired naval officer Arthur Gilbert claimed he had been praying most of the day for his wife Grace, stricken with terminal cancer, when he got up to answer a knock at his door. According to Gilbert’s account: “There stood a very tall, black-skinned, blue-eyed man who identified himself as Michael and who told me that he had been sent by God to cure Grace.” Here Grace picks up and continues the story: “Michael simply moved his right hand toward me, palm outward, but did not touch me. I felt an incredible heat emanating from Michael’s hand, and I fainted. Then a strong white light, like one of those search lights, traveled through my body. I knew something supernatural was happening to me.” Grace’s amazed doctor told her two days later that there was not longer any sign of cancer in her body and admitted he had witnessed a medical miracle.

It is important to know your purpose. By clarifying your purpose in writing an academic essay, you must think about your topic, and, in doing so, you will generate ideas which should be useful to you when you begin to write. Moreover, by establishing your purpose, you begin to get some ideas about designing an effective structure for your essay as a whole. Your work will go more smoothly if you know why you are doing it.

Thinking about your topic

By considering the expectations of your reader and by determining your purpose for writing, you start to understand what you need to say in your academic essay and how you should express yourself. You also need to take some time to think about your topic, to determine what you know already about it. You might be surprised. You might know more about your topic than you think you do. You just need a couple of strategies which will help you mine your long-term memory to re-discover information you have learned in the past. There are several methods writers use to generate ideas. Among the most popular are freewriting and questioning.

Freewriting

Freewriting is a form of brainstorming on paper. It is a technique designed to help unblock the creative process by forcing you to write something—anything—about the subject of your assignment. The process is as follows. Using your assignment as a prompt, write non-stop for a limited period of time, usually about ten minutes. You write whatever comes into your mind without worrying about spelling, grammar, or any other aspects of ‘correct’ writing. No one but you sees your freewriting. After the ten minutes are up, you read your freewriting and extract from it ideas and information that might be useful to you as you write your essay. You can use these ideas as additional prompts and freewrite again and even a third time if you feel the exercise will yield results.

Freewriting is a good pre-writing exercise, but it can be used at any point during the writing process, whenever you get bogged down or blocked.

Questioning

Journalists are taught the W5 strategy as a way of generating ideas for a story they must cover. They are taught, in other words, to inform their readers about the who, what, when, where, and why (ie. the five W’s) of the event they are covering.

This strategy can be adapted to academic writing as well. When you have selected your topic, make up a list of W5 questions about it. Who will be reading this essay? What does he or she want from me? Who are the important people relevant to the topic? Where did important events related to my topic take place? What do I want to accomplish? When the events relevant to my topic take place? Why did events transpire as they did? Why is this subject important?

Some of these questions you will be able to answer and parts of those answers, at least, will eventually find their way into your essay. Some questions you will not be able to answer but by asking them you will, at least begin to focus your research. Research strategies are covered in detail in the next Chapter.

Composing your thesis statement

The end of the beginning of the writing process is the thesis statement. The thesis statement is an expression of the central or controlling idea of your entire essay. It is the essence of your academic essay, what would be left if you put your essay into a pot and boiled it down to its most essential component.

Your thesis might be very specific and incorporate the specific aspects of your topic. Here is an example of such a thesis statement:

To take good pictures, a photographer must pay attention to composition, lighting, and point of view.

Such a thesis is effective because it provides your reader with a blueprint, a mini-plan of the body of your essay. It suggests to the reader that those three points—composition, lighting, and point of view—will be developed in more detail in subsequent paragraphs.

For a more complex essay, however, a detailed thesis might be difficult to compose and hard to understand. For such essays, you might prefer a more general thesis, for example:

Today, the narrator of John Donne’s poem The Flea would likely face a charge of sexual harassment.

This thesis has a persuasive edge to it, which means the writer will have to acknowledge and refute opposing points then develop and support her own argument. Here a general thesis is preferable because a blueprint thesis would have to encompass so much, it would likely be unwieldy.

The thesis statement is often the final sentence of the introductory paragraph. It might be spread over two sentences if the essay is long and complex. Some excellent academic essays do not even contain a recognisable single-sentence thesis in their introductions, but the essay’s central idea will certainly be implicit within the essay’s introduction. Many professors, however, do like and expect to see a clear, written thesis, within the introduction of an academic essay.

Note, finally, that at this stage of the writing process, your thesis statement is preliminary. As you think more about your topic, do some research, write a few paragraphs, your central focus might change, and you might return to the beginning of your essay and alter your thesis.

A Case Study

Audrey is a second-year student at a university in London, and she is taking a course on the literature of Elizabethan England. Her professor assigns an essay of up to 2500 words on any topic relevant to the content of the course. Audrey has always loved Shakespeare’s sonnets and was intrigued by one of her professor’s lectures, which touched upon the possibility that the characters in the sonnets were real people whom the poet knew. She decides to write her essay on these possible prototypes for the characters in the sonnets.

As we have reviewed in this Chapter, to get started, Audrey needs to consider her reader, determine her purpose, and try some freewriting, all of which she hopes will lead to at least a preliminary thesis.

She begins by considering her reader

My reader is Professor Fareed, an expert in Elizabethan literature. Obviously, she knows Shakespeare’s inside and out. She’s not going to need me to explicate any of the poems for her. I’ve got to review the evidence that exists about who these sonnet characters were and present this evidence. She’s not going to appreciate any wild theories that amateur Shakespeareans might have developed. I’ve got to go for the authoritative information. I’ve got to restrict myself to the genuine experts in the field. Prof. Fareed wants an intelligent, scholarly, considered approach to this topic.

Audrey considers her purpose

My purpose in writing this essay is to explore the possibility that the characters who reoccur in the sonnet sequence were real people Shakespeare knew. At this point, I don’t plan to make a case one way or the other: I may argue that the sonnets are autobiographical; I may argue the characters in them and their actions are fictitious. At this point I don’t know if this will be an informative (see page 18) or a persuasive (see page 21) essay. I’ll wait and see where my research leads me.

Audrey does a few minutes of freewriting

I’ve loved Shakespeare’s sonnets ever since I was 14 and we had to read “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” Since then I’ve read most of them, and this is one of the main reasons why I took Prof Fareed’s class. In one of her lectures she speculated on the identities of the “fictitious” characters who appear throughout the sonnets. I knew there has been much literary-historical-biographical speculation about the identities of these characters but I have never really had the time or inclination to investigate further. Now I do. Who exactly is the dark lady, the rival poet, the nobleman to whom the sonnets are dedicated? There’s a lot of research I’ll have to do. I’ll try the internet then books and journals in the library. How to plan the essay: work my way—and my reader’s way—through the sonnets and comment on possible biographical allusions as I go? Isolate each character and have a section in the essay on each? I’ll experiment with both. Should I take a stand? Should I try to prove the characters were real, try to prove they were fictitious? I’ll likely just consider the possibility that they were real, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me do the research first.

Audrey considers a preliminary thesis

She, wisely, has not yet decided whether she is going to present an argument that the characters in the sonnets have real-life counterparts or if she is merely going to present the evidence, such as it is, and let her readers make up their own minds. She is therefore considering several different possible thesis statements at this early phase in the process:

There is solid evidence to suggest that the rich nobleman, the dark lady, and the rival poet were real people and that the sonnets tell of their relationships with Shakespeare.

While the possibility that the rich nobleman, the dark lady, and the rival poet had real-life counterparts is intriguing, convincing evidence that Shakespeare’s sonnet characters are based upon real people does not exist.

Many scholars, encouraged by Shakespeare’s tendency to base his characters on real people, have suggested that, taken together, the sonnets tell a story based on the poet’s own experiences and that the characters in the sonnets have real-life prototypes.

Note that by taking the knowledge she already has about the sonnets and by engaging in some “pre-writing” exercises and activities, Audrey is getting a good start on her project, even though she has not done any hard research yet. By reflecting upon the needs and expectations of her reader, she has a much clearer focus for the content of her essay and the style in which it should be written. By reflecting upon her purpose in writing the essay, she realises she will eventually have to choose among several rhetorical options, as she researches and plans her work. By doing some freewriting, she reveals what she already knows about her topic, and she is already generating some useful content.

Note, as well, how, at this stage of the process, Audrey leaves so many of her options open. She has a choice among a number of rhetorical modes and thesis statements. Because the goals of a writing assignment can and often do change, as the writer researches, plans, and drafts her work, it is important not to commit completely to any course of action. Strong writers remain flexible and always open to new information that might change their approach or new ways of expressing a thought or idea.

Tutorial

Progress questions

1 1 What is the difference between a persuasive and an informative essay?

2 2 How can you generate ideas for an academic essay?

Discussion points

1 1 Why is profiling your reader an important and useful pre-writing activity?

2 2 Why is determining your purpose an important and useful pre-writing activity?

3 3 What are the benefits of freewriting?

Practical assignment

1 1 Select a popular magazine you read on a fairly regular basis. Describe in writing the target audience of this magazine. By examining the articles, the advertisements, and the letters to the editor, you should get a good idea as to the type of reader the magazine appeals to.

Study and revision tips

1 1 Keep the needs and expectations of your reader in mind throughout the writing process, not just before you begin to write.

2 2 Freewriting can be used at any time during the writing process, especially if you feel you are beginning to suffer from writer’s block.

3 3 Writers often alter or even change completely their thesis statement at different stages of the writing process.