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Sentences in essays

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1. Short, clear, and simple sentences are usually more effective than those which are long and complex. Avoid piling up clause upon clause. In the majority of essays, you should aim for clarity and simplicity in your written style. If in doubt, remember this rule: Keep it short. Keep it simple.

2. Punctuate your work firmly, making a clear distinction in your writing between marks such as the comma, the semicolon, and the full stop.

3. Remember that all sentences without exception must begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop.

4. Remember that the common word order (syntax) of a simple sentence written in English is as follows:

subject – verb – object

The cat eats the goldfish
Elephants like grass
We are the best team

If you are in any doubt at all, follow this pattern. Sentences which go out of grammatical control often lack one of these elements, or they have them placed in a different order.

5. You should avoid starting sentences with words such as ‘Again’, ‘Although’, ‘But’, ‘And’, ‘Also’, and ‘With’. These words are called conjunctions, which normally belong in the ‘middle’ of a sentence, not at its beginning. Sentences which begin with a conjunction are very often left grammatically incomplete.

6. Remember that speech and writing are two different forms of communication. Avoid the use of a casual or conversational style when writing. For instance don’t string together clauses which are grammatically unrelated. This is quite normal in speech, but it should be avoided in formal writing.

7. What follows is an example of a statement which has too many unrelated clauses, which goes on too long, and which eventually skids out of grammatical control.

Less smoking would undoubtedly lead to redundancies in the tobacco industry, a consequent rise in the number of unemployed, more people dependent upon State benefits to be supported by a government with subsequently reduced income.

8. The same arguments can be expressed far more clearly and effectively by splitting them up into two separate and shorter sentences. (I have also made one or two minor changes to enhance the sense.)

Less smoking would undoubtedly lead to redundancies in the tobacco industry and a consequent rise in the number of unemployed. More people would then become dependent upon State benefits, which would have to be paid out by a government with a reduced income.

9. Most problems in sentence construction are caused by two or three closely related factors:

  • The sentence is much too long.
  • Too many unrelated clauses.
  • The sentence starts with its verb or object, rather than the subject.
  • The sentence start with a conjunction (‘although’, ‘because’).

10. The solution to this problem is worth repeating:

Keep it short. Keep it simple.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Signposting in essays

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1. In most essays (up to 3000 words) you should avoid ‘signposting’ your argument. That is, you do not need to use expressions such as

‘Later in this essay I will be discussing…’
‘Let us now go on to consider…’
‘As I demonstrated earlier…’
‘We will now turn to evaluate another example…’

2. Just state clearly the point of your arguments and leave them to speak for themselves, uncluttered by any direction indicators. You do not need to offer a commentary on what you have already said, or what you will be saying later. In a well-planned essay, this progression should be self-evident from the arrangement of your work.

3. A sound essay plan and a coherent structure will reveal the logic of your argument and the relationship of its parts. If you have, for instance, four main topics to discuss, simple state clearly what those topics are, then deal with them separately, one after the other.

4. Each new topic should be clearly identified or defined as soon as you begin dealing with it. This statement will provide all the indication needed of your intentions. Remember that each paragraph should deal with just one principal stage or item of your argument. Each new topic requires a separate paragraph.

5. If you wish to some light indication of structure, it is perfectly acceptable to use formulations such as

‘The first reason … The second…’
‘On one hand … on the other…’
‘However, the main argument against this is…’

These statements will demonstrate that you have control of your argument.

6. Remember that although an essay may take many hours to write, it will only take a few minutes to read. Signposting is only necessary in very long pieces of work. Even then, skillful writers will integrate any direction indicators into their work as unobtrusively as possible.

7. The conventions on signposting may vary slightly from one subject to another. In some of the sciences it is necessary to announce in advance what you will be writing about. However, these pieces of work are likely to be closer to experimental reports than continuous prose arguments.

8. Similarly, in some branches of psychology or linguistics, students may sometimes be required to offer a meta-critique of a written assignment. They will be expected to describe what they are writing. This is to demonstrate their awareness of the processes in which they are engaged.

9. With these few exceptions, you should not normally comment on the manner in which you have written an essay. Your tutor doesn’t need to know in what order you assembled your evidence, or what difficulties you encountered during its composition. Some students try to disarm possible criticism by announcing in advance how difficult the question was to answer. Your tutor will already know its degree of difficulty, and doesn’t need to be told again.

10. However, you may wish to argue that the question raises a certain number of difficulties or crucial issues. This is acceptable – so long as you say what they are. You should then go on to discuss their relevance to the subject in question, and maybe even suggest some answers to them.

11. The conventions on signposting in report writing are different. Reports are normally written to a pre-determined structure or set of headings. These provide the sequence of events which in a conventional essay have to be constructed by the author.

12. A report of an investigation or an experiment will also have its own sequence of events, so it will be quite acceptable to use expressions such as ‘First the X was added to the Y … and then Z occurred … The results were then analysed and are shown in Table One’.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Spelling checkers used for essays

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1. Most word-processors have spelling checkers these days. You should use the checker before printing out your documents. This should form part of your regular editing procedures.

2. Checking your work with a spell-checker will help to highlight and correct commonly mis-spelt words such as ‘accommodation’, ‘parallel’, ‘recommend’, and ‘silhouette’.

3. The checker will also highlight mis-keyed words such as ‘hte’ for ‘the’ or ‘nad’ for ‘and’. You may either choose the correct word from a list, or the processor may offer you the opportunity to reverse the mis-keyed letters. [The latest even perform this function automatically.]

4. It will not be able to recognise specialist terms and unusual proper nouns – names such as Schumacher, Derrida, or Nabokov. These will not be in the processor’s memory. You will have to check the correct spelling of these yourself, as you would do with any other unusual words.

5. Remember that a spell-checker will not alert you to a mistake if you write ‘They washed there own clothes’ instead of ‘They washed their own clothes’. That’s because the word ‘there’ is spelt correctly even though it is being used ungrammatically in this sentence. The same would be true of ‘It is over hare’ instead of ‘It is over here’. That’s because ‘hare’ exists in its own right as a correctly spelt word.

6. Most spell-checkers will spot unwanted double words such as ‘going to to the fair’, and will offer you the opportunity to delete the second occurrence. But they will not notice anything wrong with a word broken by a space such as ‘to morrow’. That’s because these two terms exist in their own right as separate words.

7. The checker will not alert you to any mistake if you key the word ‘practice’ instead of ‘practise’, because both words exist separately. The same would be true of ‘advise’ and ‘advice’. [Most grammar-checkers will alert you to these common problems.]

8. If you decide to add to the processor’s memory names which are frequently used in your own subject discipline (Freud, Jung, Adler or Marx, Engels, Bukharin) make sure that you enter them correctly spelt.

9. Beware of adding too many names which might be thrown up in the checking of your document. Some proper nouns may be the same as mis-spelt words. If you were to add ‘Fischer’ to the dictionary as a name, this would mean that the spell-checker would not alert you to a problem if you mis-keyed ‘fisher’ as ‘fischer’.

10. Beware of adding to your processor’s dictionary just because it is easy and seems a profitable thing to do. You might for instance add your own postcode of ‘SE9 6OY’ – but if you then mis-keyed the word ‘TOY’ as ‘6OY’ the spell-checker would not then be able to pick up your mistake. It would assume that you wished to regard ‘6OY’ as an acceptable ‘word’.

11. A spell check is usually performed after all your text has been generated and edited. However, there are good arguments for using the checker at earlier stages. Layout and spacing might be affected; the document will be in a reasonably good condition at any given stage; and it may eliminate the necessity for a search and-replace procedure at a later stage.

12. Finally, here is a cautionary (and amusing) ditty which might help you to remember some of these points:

‘My New Spell Checker’

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

[Sauce unknown]

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Structure in essay plans

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1. The structure of a piece of writing is the (sometimes underlying) order of its parts. Good structure usually means that a persuasive or logical sequence of these parts has been created. This is often best established by creating the structure in essay plans.

2. The basic structure of most essays can be very simple:

  • Introduction
  • Argument(s)
  • Conclusion

3. Provided that the individual topics of your argument(s) are arranged in a clear and meaningful order, this basic model should create a firm structure.

4. The order of the parts is often determined by the nature of the subject in question. This order might be created by:

  • logical progression
  • increasing significance
  • equal significance
  • chronological order
  • narrative sequence
  • category groupings

Arranging the parts

5. Imagine you were writing an essay about French wine. You have decided to discuss four red wines and four white wines. The structure for this essay is created by diving the examples into white wines and red wines – as shown here.

Introduction

Part One – Red wines
* wine 1
* wine 2
* wine 3
* wine 4

Part Two – White wines
* wine 1
* wine 2
* wine 3
* wine 4

Conclusion

6. This is clear, simple, and uncomplicated. But you could also create a slightly more interesting structure by arranging the wines by region. This is the arrangement shown here.

Introduction

Loire
* red wine
* white wine

Bordeaux
* red wine
* white wine

Cotes du Rhone
* red wine
* white wine

Bugundy
* red wine
* white wine

Conclusion

7. It’s the same number of examples, but the arrangement is slightly more complex. This might also make the essay more interesting. Notice how each item is kept separate – so they don’t get mixed up. And each one would be discussed in a paragraph of its own.

8. Next – this process can be taken one step further with a slightly more complex question. You might often be asked to write an essay considering the arguments for and against some topic or proposition. For instance – “Consider the arguments for and against congestion charges in city centres.”

9. There are two ways you can arrange the structure for an essay of this type. Here’s the first, which we’ll call Strategy A.

Introduction

Part One – In favour of congestion charges
* [traffic] reduces volume
* [ecology] less air pollution
* [economy] generates local income
* [politics] positive social control

Part Two – Against congestion charges
* [traffic] public transport alternatives
* [ecology] transfers problem elsewhere
* [economy] reduces profitable activity
* [politics] punishes tax-payers

Conclusion

10. The arguments in favour of congestion charges are kept separate from the arguments against. The structure is simple, clear, and uncomplicated. Notice that the same topics (traffic, ecology, economy, and politics) are covered in both the case ‘for’ and ‘against’. Next – look at an alternative strategy, Strategy B.

11. You can see that in this example the structure is arranged in the form of TOPICS – and each one contains an argument for and against the proposal.

Introduction to congestion charges

TOPIC 1
* [traffic] reduces volume
* [traffic] public transport alternatives

TOPIC 2
* [ecology] less air pollution
* [ecology] transfers problem elsewhere

TOPIC 3
* [economy] generates local income
* [economy] reduces profitable activity

TOPIC 4
* [politics] positive social control
* [politics] punishes tax-payers

Conclusion

12. It’s fairly important if you are using this structure to keep a balance. And the topics must be clearly identified and matched. That is, you must not put an argument FOR economy alongside one AGAINST traffic

13. If there is no natural order for your topics, you might deal with them in order of their importance. You could deal with the smaller, less important items first. This leaves the larger, more important issues until the end of the essay. Discussing the detail first in this way leaves the larger items for general consideration in approaching your conclusion.

14. On the other hand you might wish to deal with the major item(s) first, then turn to a consideration of the detailed evidence which supports the argument you are making. Using this approach, you could then return to your main points again and give them further general consideration as your conclusion.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Taking notes for essays

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1. In preparation for writing an essay, you should be taking notes from a number of different sources: course materials, set texts, secondary reading, or tutorials and lectures. You might gather information from radio or television broadcasts, or from experiments and research projects. The notes could also include your own ideas, generated as part of the essay planning process.

2. The notes you gather in preparation for writing the essay will normally provide the detailed evidence to back up your arguments. They might also include such things as the quotations and page references you plan to use in your essay. Your ultimate objective in planning will be to produce a one or two page outline of the topics you intend to cover.

3. Be prepared for the fact that you might take many more notes than you will ever use. This is perfectly normal. At the note-taking stage you might not be sure exactly what evidence you will need. In addition, the information-gathering stage should also be one of digesting and refining your ideas.

4. Don’t feel disappointed if you only use a quarter or even a tenth of your materials. The proportion you finally use might vary from one subject to another, as well as depending on your own particular writing strategy. Just because some material is not used, don’t imagine that your efforts have been wasted.

5. When taking notes from any source, keep in mind that you are attempting to make a compressed and accurate record of information, other people’s opinions, and possibly your own observations on the subject in question.

6. Your objective whilst taking the notes is to distinguish the more important from the less important points being made. Record the main issues, not the details. You might write down a few words of the original if you think they may be used in a quotation. Keep these extracts as short as possible unless you will be discussing a longer passage in some detail.

7. Don’t try to write down every word of a lecture – or copy out long extracts from books. One of the important features of note-taking is that you are making a digest of the originals, and translating the information into your own words.

8. Some students take so many notes that they don’t know which to use when it’s time to write the essay. They feel that they are drowning in a sea of information.

9. This problem is usually caused by two common weaknesses in note-taking technique:

  • transcribing too much of the original
  • being unselective in the choice of topics

10. There are two possible solutions to this problem:

  • Select only those few words of the source material which will be of use. Avoid being descriptive. Think more, and write less. Be rigorously selective.
  • Keep the essay question or topic more clearly in mind. Take notes only on those issues which are directly relevant to the subject in question.

11. Even though the notes you take are only for your own use, they will be more effective if they are recorded clearly and neatly. Good layout of the notes will help you to recall and assess the material more readily. If in doubt use the following general guidelines.

Taking Notes – GUIDELINES

  1. Before you even start, make a note of your source(s). If this is a book, an article, or a journal, write the following information at the head of your notes: Author, title, publisher, publication date, edition of book.
     
  2. Use loose-leaf A4 paper. This is now the international standard for almost all educational printed matter. Don’t use small notepads. You will find it easier to keep track of your notes if they fit easily alongside your other study materials.
     
  3. Write clearly and leave a space between each note. Don’t try to cram as much as possible onto one page. Keeping the items separate will make them easier to recall. The act of laying out information in this way will cause you to assess the importance of each detail.
     
  4. Use some system of tabulation (as I am doing in these notes). This will help to keep the items separate from each other. Even if the progression of numbers doesn’t mean a great deal, it will help you to keep the items distinct.
     
  5. Don’t attempt to write continuous prose. Notes should be abbreviated and compressed. Full grammatical sentences are not necessary. Use abbreviations, initials, and shortened forms of commonly used terms.
     
  6. Don’t string the points together continuously, one after the other on the page. You will find it very difficult to untangle these items from each other after some time has passed.
     
  7. Devise a logical and a memorable layout. Use lettering, numbering, and indentation for sections and for sub-sections. Use headings and sub-headings. Good layout will help you to absorb and recall information. Some people use coloured inks and highlighters to assist this process of identification.
     
  8. Use a new page for each set of notes. This will help you to store and identify them later. Keep topics separate, and have them clearly titled and labelled to facilitate easy recall.
     
  9. Write on one side of the page only. Number these pages. Leave the blank sides free for possible future additions, and for any details which may be needed later.

Sample notes

What follows is an example of notes taken whilst listening to an Open University radio broadcast – a half hour lecture by the philosopher and cultural historian, Isaiah Berlin. It was entitled Tolstoy’s Views on Art and Morality, which was part of the third level course in literary studies ‘A 312 – The Nineteenth Century Novel and its Legacy.

Isaiah Berlin – ‘Tolstoy on Art and Morality’ 03 Sep 1989

1. T’s views on A extreme – but he asks important questns which disturb society

2. 1840s Univ of Kazan debate on purpose of A
T believes there should be simple answers to probs of life

3. Met simple & spontaneous people & soldiers in Caucasus
Crimean Sketches admired by Turgenev & Muscovites but T didn’t fit in milieu

4. Westernizers Vs Slavophiles – T agreed with Ws – but rejects science (Ss romantic conservatives)

5. 2 views of A in mid 19C – A for art’s sake/ A for society’s sake

6. Pierre (W&P) and Levin (AK) as egs of ‘searchers for truth’

7. Natural life (even drunken violence) better than intellectual

8. T’s contradiction – to be artist or moralist

9. T’s 4 criteria for work of art

  • know what you want to say – lucidly and clearly
  • subject matter must be of essential interest
  • artist must live or imagine concretely his material
  • A must know the moral centre of situation

10. T crit of other writers

Shkspre and Goethe – too complex
St Julien (Flaubert) inauthentic
Turgenev and Chekhov guilty of triviality

11. What is Art? Emotion recollected and transmitted to others
[Wordsworth] Not self-expression – Only good should be transmitted

12. But his own tastes were for high art – Chopin, Beethoven, & Mozart
T Argues he himself corrupted

13. Tried to distinguish between his own art and moral tracts

14. ‘Artist cannot help burning like a flame’

15. Couldn’t reconcile contradictions in his own beliefs
Died still raging against self and society

© Roy Johnson 2003

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The Total Library

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criticism, journalism, film reviews, and essays

Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few writers to establish an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories: (Katherine Mansfield is another). In fact because he never wrote any long works, it is often assumed that he didn’t write very much. The truth is the exact opposite: he never stopped writing, and The Total Library, this huge collection of his non-fiction works is only a sample of his vast output.

The Total LibraryFrom his earliest years he produced book reviews, essays, lectures, film reviews, prologues, and translations in addition to his now-famous fictions. He even invented literary genres – the essay which is part philosophic reflection and part fiction; studies of imaginary works; and biographies of people who did not exist. This in addition to spoofs, mind games, and metaphysical writings of a kind that seem to transcend national boundaries – which is partly why he managed to establish his international reputation.

Borges’ attitude to the lecture illustrates both his personality and his versatility. In his earlier years he gave ‘lectures’ by sitting on the stage and letting somebody else read out a prepared text to the audience. After he went blind he didn’t write out a text at all, but sat in front of the audience and improvised monologues on his chosen topic. He is an immensely sophisticated playboy of the literary world

This volume is a very wide collection in chronological terms – from his earliest pieces written in the 1920s to fragments written shortly before his death in 1986. It even includes early work he later disowned, but which here has wisely been included. This allows us to follow (in excellent translation) the development of his approach to writing.

It has to be said that his early work is marked by an inflated and pretentious literary style – for instance his habit of trying to impress with paradoxical statements “all the film’s characters are recklessly normal”. He also seems to have adopted a great deal of whimsy from the English authors who were the favourite reading of his earlier years. But this affectation drops away from the early 1930s onwards.

At their most lightweight, some of these pieces are no more than paragraph long observations, but at their best they offer amazingly perceptive analyses based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and love of literature. For instance in the middle of discussing Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener he persuasively argues that the text prefigures the work of Kafka in its rigorous logic and black humour. This is a perception he elaborated into a full length essay seven years later – ‘Kafka and his Precursors’ (1951) in which he wittily argues that great writers create not only their own works, but also their readers and even their precursors. He illustrates what we now call Kafkaesque elements in the work of Kierkegaard and Robert Browning, then observes:

Kafka’s idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. .. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

There are surprises on nearly every page. Borges repeatedly asserts that whilst James Joyce is a great twentieth century writer, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are ‘unreadable’. In his film criticism, he pours scorn on King Kong and Now, Voyager (‘Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful‘). He defends Rudyard Kipling against his political detractors. And his celebration of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass will make you want to dash out and buy a copy, if you don’t already have one.

There would be a good argument for reading this collection backwards – starting with pieces such as the magnificent essay on ‘The Detective Story’ (1951) or on ‘Blindness'(1977) which is a poetic meditation on the advantages he has gained from losing his own sight – which turn out to be his learning Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian languages. Work your way in reverse chronological order through his essays on anti-Semitism and the second world war, via the sketches he produced for Hogar (the Argentinean equivalent of Ladies’ Home Journal) until you reach the material he (understandably) disowned. For those who have read his celebrated short stories in Ficciones, Labyrinths, and The Book of Imaginary Beings, this collection is a welcome addition to understanding a fascinating writer.

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Total Library Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011

Jorge Luis Borges, The Total Library, London: Penguin Books, 2001, pp.560, ISBN: 0141183020

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Titles in essays

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1. Publications of book length such as text books or novels should normally be presented by giving their titles in italics. [In hand-written essays, this will be denoted by underlining].

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
R.G. Lipman’s Positive Ergonomics

2. When using a word-processor you should use italics for titles (with bold reserved for special emphasis). Remember to be consistent throughout your document, and do not combine any of these attributes.

3. You should not combine underlining or italics with quotation marks.

4. The titles of short stories and songs are indicated by single quote marks:

Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Voyage’
Kurt Weil’s show tune ‘September Song’

5. Thus, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ is a celebrated short story, but his long novel Ulysses is even more famous.

6. When offering book titles in references and endnotes the sequence of information given is as follows:

AUTHOR—TITLE—PUBLISHER—DATE—PAGE

Valerie Shaw, The Short Story, Longman, 1983, p.56.

If you are using the Harvard system of referencing, remember to put the date of publication after the author’s name.

7. The titles of individual poems are indicated by using roman type and single quote marks, thus:

W.H.Auden’s ‘Night Mail’
Browning’s ‘Pippa Passes’

8. Where a long poem has been published on its own, it may be indicated as a book, thus:

T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land
Milton’s Paradise Lost

9. Where a number of poems has been collected as a group, they are treated as a book, as follows:

‘Tess’s Lament’ is one of the poems in Thomas Hardy’s 1903 collection, Poems of the Past and the Present.

10. You should always make a clear distinction between fictional characters and books which are named after them. David Copperfield is a fictional character, whereas David Copperfield is the novel which bears his name. The same is true of Middlemarch (the fictional town) and Middlemarch (the novel).

11. Plays are indicated in the same way as novels, because they are usually published in single volume form.

Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windermere’s Fan
Shakespeare’s The Tempest

12. Magazines, newspapers, and journals are indicated in the same way as books:

The Economist     The Daily Telegraph
Architectural Review     English Studies

13. Individual articles from within these separate publications are indicated by single quotation marks and roman type, as follows:

A.B. Smith’s review article ‘Foreign Practices’ in The Observer business section of 27 October 1991.

14. The titles of films, radio and television programmes are also indicated by italics:

Double Indemnity     Round the Horne
Newsnight     World in Action

15. This convention also applies to the names of famous operas, ballets, paintings and sculptures:

The Magic Flute     Swan Lake
The Night Watch     David

16. When the title of a work includes mention of another book title, the second title should be placed in single quotation marks:

A.B. Smith, The Textual Development of ‘King Lear’, New York: Scholarship Press, 1986.

17. Notice that capital letters are used in the first word and any other important words of titles. Less important words such as ‘and’, ‘of’, and ‘in’ are not capitalised:

The Power and the Glory
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

18. The titles of works which are stored in electronic form will follow similar conventions, but are described separately.

19. Sometimes in documents stored as web pages, bold is used instead of italics because it shows up better on screen.

20. Whichever conventions you use, you should be consistent throughout your document.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Tone in essays

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1. The tone in essays or any other piece of writing can be roughly defined as ‘the author’s attitude to the subject – as manifest in the writing’. In academic essays (unless you have been instructed otherwise) you should adopt a tone which is neutral and objective. Your attitude to the subject should be serious and formal.

2. For instance, too much use of ‘I think that…’ and ‘I feel that…’ has the effect of making an essay too personal and subjective in its tone, as in this example:

‘I think that E.H. Carr is a really brilliant historian, and when I first started reading his book The Bolshevik Revolution I suddenly felt … ‘

3. This approach is also likely to encourage a casual and conversational style, which is inappropriate in a formal essay.

4. Avoid using features such as slang (‘far-out’) contractions (‘can’t’ or ‘they’ll’) and vogue words (‘situation’, ‘ongoing’, ‘fantastic’) which create a tone which is too chatty and casual.

5. Avoid the use of ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’ by substituting impersonal expressions such as ‘It seems that…Carr argues that…but there is now increasingly good evidence to show that…’

6. The following example illustrates an inappropriate tone which combines chattiness with writing in note form. It is from a student essay on ‘The Origins of the Industrial Revolution’.

Easy access to raw materials – coal, iron, etc. And cheap labour too (all exploited of course!). Then inland waterways and the building of the ship canal. Lots of good markets overseas as well.

7. These notes should be expanded and expressed as grammatically complete sentences in a manner such as this:

In that part of the North West there was easy access to raw materials such as coal and iron. The sources of labour were also cheap at that time since there was such unchecked exploitation. A system of inland water ways provided good transportation. This was especially true following the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal. In addition, Britain in the nineteenth century had access to (and in some cases a monopoly of) a number of overseas markets.

8. A manner of expression which is direct, simple, and clear is preferable to one which is flamboyant or wordy. Keep your sentences short and to the point. ‘He sent for the doctor’ is more direct than ‘He called into requisition the services of the family physician.’

9. Some people imagine that an ornate or flamboyant manner is necessary in order to create a good impression. This is not true. In fact the opposite is the case. Too many flourishes or a sense or wordiness will weaken your essay. Adopt a plain, straightforward prose style. Remember that academic essays are not exercises in creative writing. You will not give your work a sense of purpose or seriousness simply by adding literary decoration. Even when one is sorely tempted – one should eschew the grandiloquent. [That’s a deliberately bad example, by the way!]

10. All this is not a killjoy injunction against writing which is stylistically attractive. If you write fluently and include the occasional well-turned phrase, then your work will be more pleasant to read. If you are in any doubt however — Keep it plain and simple.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Topics in essays

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sample from HTML program and PDF book

1. Topics are distinct units of meaning. They are normally sub-divisions of a subject, but they can sometimes stand as the purpose of an essay in their own right.

2. For instance, if the subject of an essay was ‘government’, the separate topics for discussion might be ‘finance and taxation’, ‘law-making’, ‘public health’, and ‘international diplomacy’. Each one of these however might, in a different context, be a subject on its own.

3. If ‘international diplomacy’ became the main subject of an essay, this might be considered by sub-dividing it into topics such as ‘government policy’, ‘political history’, ‘trade and industry’, and ‘foreign relations’.

4. In most essays, the subject in question can and should be broken down into a series of separate topics. These are then arranged in some persuasive or logical order at the planning stage to form your argument.

5. Remember that each paragraph normally deals with a separate topic. This should be signalled (usually by a ‘topic sentence’) at the outset. Its relevance to the subject in question should also be explained as part of the argument.

6. In the following essay plan the main subject is ‘French wine’ and the topics to be discussed are Loire wines, Bordeaux wines, Cotes du Rhone wines, and Burgundy wines.

Introduction

Loire
* red wine
* white wine

Bordeaux
* red wine
* white wine

Cotes du Rhone
* red wine
* white wine

Bugundy
* red wine
* white wine

Conclusion

7. In the following essay plan the main subject is ‘Congestion charging in city centres’, and the topics to be covered are – traffic density, ecology, economy, and politics.

Introduction

Part One – In favour of congestion charges
* [traffic] reduces volume
* [ecology] less air pollution
* [economy] generates local income
* [politics] positive social control

Part Two – Against congestion charges
* [traffic] public transport alternatives
* [ecology] transfers problem elsewhere
* [economy] reduces profitable activity
* [politics] punishes tax-payers

Conclusion

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Virginia Woolf on Fiction

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essays on novelists, fiction, and the novel

Virginia Woolf on Fiction is a collection of essays on the subject of imaginative narratives. Virginia Woolf never went to university – in fact she hardly even went to school in the sense we think of formal education today. Yet she had a superb education – largely via free access to her father’s library in which he encouraged her to browse. From this she gained not only a first-hand acquaintance with the literary classics, but a love of books and an appreciation of the sheer pleasure of reading. She also studied languages – including Latin and Greek.

Virginia Woolf on fictionShe went on to become a pivotal figure in the development of the modernist novel, and her collected non-fiction essays now stand at six large volumes. In fact she published her first writing as book reviews in the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. She also cultivated the discursive essay as a literary form, and this collection testifies to both the wide range of her erudition and her sharp insights into the nature of fiction as a practising novelist.

The first essay ‘Hours in a Library’ (Times Literary Supplement, 1916) deals with the pleasures of reading and the distinctions to be made between classical and contemporary writers. Not surprisingly, her sympathies lie largely with the traditional – for good reasons:

it is oddly difficult in the case of new books to know which are the real books and what it is they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two

In ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ (New York Herald Tribune, 1927) she challenges the critic (and herself) to do just the opposite – that is, to look at contemporary writing and hazard a guess about cultural trends and the possible literary future. She does this by explaining why poetry can no longer deal successfully with the huge contradictions which the first world war and its aftermath had made so apparent. The same is also true of the poetic drama – which by that time had become a completely dead literary genre. But prose fiction in the elastic form of the novel has a better chance.

What she goes on to do is sketch out a menu of options for the novel in terms of form and content. The novel of the future will be poetic, but written in prose. It will uncover new truths about life – by exploring those aspects of human existence which writers have so far ignored:

the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect upon us of the shape of trees or the play of colour…the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine

Her argument is almost a working compilation of notes for what was to be her next major experimental novel The Waves which she published only four years later.

Another essay, Women and Fiction (The Forum, 1929) is a rehearsal of the arguments she went on to expand in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – reflections on the relationship between women and literature. Woolf emphasises that this means both literature written by women and the role of women in literature – two elements that she argues are closely interlinked.

She explores the reasons why the female writer did not produce fiction until the nineteenth century – largely because she had no independence, no income of her own, and no ‘room to herself’. But given the advantages of post-suffrage woman in the twentieth century, Woolf sees the possibility of female writers discovering their own voices. All the now-familiar issues of écriture feminine are sketched out here in their earliest form:

before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face … the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.

The centrepiece of the collection is ‘Phases of Fiction’ (The Bookman, 1929). In this she looks at the essential nature of the novel, and what it is that makes readers voluntarily suspend disbelief to immerse themselves in invented worlds and imaginary characters. She divides novelists into realists (Maupassant) romantics (Stevenson) creators of character (Dickens) and psychologists (Proust). Her conclusion is that the novel as a literary genre, for all its weaknesses and comparative recency, offered readers at its best a deep experience of “the growth and development of feelings”.

We watch the character and behaviour of Becky Sharp or Richard Feverel and instinctively come to an opinion about them as about real people, tacitly accepting this or that impression, judging each motive, and forming an opinion that they are charming but insincere, good or dull, secretive but interesting, as we make up our minds about the characters of the people we meet.

She stands foursquare in defence of the novelist’s art and the relevance of fiction to a civilized intellectual life – and yet in one of her many insightful asides she accurately predicts what has happened to the novel in the time since her writing.

Hence the futility at present of any theory of ‘the future of fiction’. The next ten years will certainly upset it; the next century will blow it to the winds.

This publication deserves a proper introduction, situating the essays in their original contexts, but as an example of Woolf’s supple and intelligent non-fiction writing it offers insights into the nature of fiction which are timeless.

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© Roy Johnson 2011

Virginia Woolf, On Fiction, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.94, ISBN: 1843916185

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