Anthem Guide to Essay Writing

by Carole L. Hamilton

Overview

The ‘Anthem Guide to Essay Writing’ is a comprehensive guide to writing successful essays in any course, with step-by-step advice and plenty of examples. One of the greatest assets of this book is its insights into how essays are evaluated, so that writers can focus their efforts productively. It demonstrates each step of the writing process – from close reading and research to generating ideas, organizing thoughts, structuring a draft essay, and revising for clarity and eloquence. If you want to improve the quality of your essays, you will find clear, helpful advice in this easy-to-use guide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857289759
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Series:	Anthem Learning Series
Edition description:	First
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Carole L. Hamilton teaches English at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in North Carolina, USA. She is a recipient of the 2006 United States Department of Education Distinguished Teaching Award. Her students have won many awards for creative and analytical writing.

Read an Excerpt

Anthem Guide to Essay Writing

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By Carole L. Hamilton

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2011 Carole L. Hamilton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-975-9

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CHAPTER 1

READING AND RESEARCHING

1.1 Annotating Texts

In old black-and-white films, the young newspaper writer tilts his hat off his forehead, puts a clean sheet of paper into a manual typewriter, and starts writing the lead article that will hit the front page the next day. The paragraphs flow from his razor-sharp mind straight to the paper, in a well ordered march of ideas. But, as they say, "life ain't like the movies." Nor is writing. A good essay doesn't spring to the mind immediately, but evolves slowly, after hard thinking and planning. It starts with making keen observations of the material under study. That is why this book on writing starts with training your eye in reading. This chapter teaches you one surefire way to annotate a text, identifying passages and ideas that are worth writing about. You will develop your own method as you become a more experienced close reader.

No matter what you are annotating, whether scholarly articles, poetry, fiction, art, charts, or statistical data, read with pen or stylus in hand, ready to highlight things that are unusual, interesting, puzzling, or surprising. Pick texts that are within your grasp — not highly complex, jargon-filled material — and then spend the time to truly understand them. Don't skip over the parts that confuse you. They may contain the "keys to the kingdom" of understanding the piece, even if they don't proffer their wisdom at once. Write a question mark or tentative interpretation next to the difficult parts, and come back to them later. Also gloss difficult words or phrases, guessing at the meaning from the context. Write this meaning in the margin and look it up later for confirmation or correction. Marginal notes can also include quick summaries, your immediate reaction, questions, connections to other materials. Highlight key examples, statistics, analogies, rhetorical devices, and so on. Also note the writer's tone and point of view. Your eventual goal is to read quickly and efficiently, making margin notes while sustaining your attention to the unfolding story. However, until you reach a level of confident proficiency, work slowly so that you discover key passages that will take your analysis beyond the obvious to an interpretation that you will enjoy explaining.

Judge how much to annotate so that you don't underline every line or get so bogged down that you lose the thread of meaning. If this occurs, read once quickly for meaning, just highlighting what stands out the most as you go, then re-read, catching deeper nuances in the second pass.

You can also create an index of passages electronically or inside the front cover of your book, so that you can easily find the interesting passages, organized by topic. This method is especially helpful for longer texts. Train yourself to update your index as you read. You may think that you will remember a given incident, but most likely, you won't. Some new idea will emerge and the previous one will be lost. So get it down now, and you will save hours of frustration when you write your essay. Sample index:

The Things They Carried (inside cover)

Games 32, 37, 70

Definitions of war 80, 85

Appositives 7, 9, 15, 17, 22, 34, 39, 43, 45, 45, 51

Storytelling 32, 34, 39, 72, 77, 78, 86, 106, 112, 127, 130, 236

Truth 46, 71, 77, 82, 85, 89, 89, 180

You can see how an index you make can save you much time when looking for passages to support your essay.

What to highlight:

• Main ideas and themes

• Ambiguous/puzzling words, phrases, imagery

• Core concepts, phrases, and themes

• Poetic devices or rhetorical devices

• Useful analogies, examples, and recurring motifs

• Shifts in mood, pace, topic, point of view, plot, relationships

• Key statistics, significant quotations, potential evidence

• Writer's tone and point of view

What to jot in the margins:

• Meanings/definitions

• Reactions, questions, interpretations

• Brief summary of action or ideas

Sample Annotation of a Poem:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There is no specific way to annotate. Find a method that works for you. Make sure that your abbreviations will make sense to you later! You can also insert page tabs to make it easy to find a specific page. There is no need to annotate every paragraph or page, for that will require you to sort through more information than you might need.

Sample Annotation of Research Material:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

1.2 Taking Notes

Computers make it easy to grab a bit of text and save it for easy insertion into an essay. Perhaps the phrase "note-taking" should be replaced by "source-snipping." Because it is so easy, you can be tempted to save every possible passage, thus creating a mass of material to sort through later. This only delays the thinking time needed to identify the specific quotations that are relevant and useful to keep. So take the time to select brief passages that state an idea concisely. Include your reactions as you go, being careful to distinguish your words from source material. Use discretion in selecting each passage, but go ahead and record passages you think you might need it, as they may be difficult to find later.

If you take notes on a computer, consider one of the many programs that allow you to replicate note cards. These programs make it easy to move the cards around when you get ready to organize your essay.

During the note-taking phase make sure that you clearly differentiate between paraphrased material, quoted words, and your own observations. To keep track of which words are yours and which come from others, put quotation marks around all words taken directly from the source, and write the author and page number after each paragraph. For paraphrased material, leave out the quotation marks, but, again, put the author and page number after the paraphrased material. Put the ideas into your own words, but be sure to preserve the original sense. Put [brackets] around all of your own comments, or type them in a different font, or use some other means to make them stand out from notes from sources. Taking the time to identify every single line of notes will save you hours of frustration later. It is very difficult to find a particular passage again when you do not have the page number or, worse, cannot remember which source contained it.

For research essays, write the full citation at the top of each page of notes, along with a one-sentence summary of the content of this source. If you happen to have an idea of what subtopics you will need, you can start a page of notes for each one, making sure to include a citation for each piece of quoted evidence. Start your works cited page immediately and keep it current as you proceed. Keep your working thesis literally in front of you as you read; otherwise, you may find yourself wasting time on irrelevant though interesting reading. Start a draft outline as soon as the structure of the essay begins to take shape in your mind. Revise the outline and thesis as you go.

Sample Note for an Essay on Cuba:

Notes from Nelson Amaro Victoria "Mass and Class in the Origins of the Cuban Revolution" Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID) Vol 4 Number 10 October 1968 pgs 223-237 EBSCO Dec 18, 2009

"From 1954 to 1959, 82.3 percent [of rural peasants] migrated to urban areas [looking for work in the burgeoning industries, but most of them became the] urban unemployed." Victoria 224

"69 percent" of the urban unemployed "expected [Cuba's] economic problems to be resolved politically." Victoria 225

"Zeitlin's (1966b: 47ff.) study confirms ... that the greater degree of marginality of industrial workers to positions of authority, the greater their support of the Revolution. Further, workers employed for longer periods of time were less likely to support the Revolution than were the underemployed and unemployed." Victoria 225 [Marxism targets wage earners and proceeds from the ground up. Is this what occurred in Cuba?]

"Practically all the Cuban people identified with the 26th of July Movement, and it in turn tried by every means to disseminate its ideological content as widely as possible." Victoria 230 [note how many tvs the people had — this was a media event]

"The people continued to be elated. Castro spoke practically every week on television, and was followed in his travels by representatives of all the media. His speeches were often made without warning, and lasted for many hours, upsetting the usual schedule of programs. Those in power were constantly in the news and the country was being rocked by the ongoing changes: the Rent Laws, the Agrarian Reform, the Tax Reform, the military trials of those accused of committing genocide during the Batista regime; the efforts of the various revolutionary organizations." Victoria 231 [were these Castro's reforms? If so, they would certainly make the low wage earners happy]

"'People's Shops' were established, which offered merchandise to the peasants at practically cost price. The Prime Minister himself took walks in these zones, and it was rumored that he carried a checkbook and would distribute checks then and there, according to the needs of the various zones." Victoria 231 [he's making himself into a hero of the people, erasing the bureaucracy between the president and his citizens]

"The Cuban Revolution underwent an essential change in its nature; the intervening factor was a modification in the thoughts expressed by the principal leaders ... [Castro mentioned] "dangers suffered by Cuba due to the existence of 'Yankee Imperialism' and of the old social classes which had reigned over Cuba." Victoria 235

There was a "lack of faith in the political institutions." Victoria 236

Notice that the student has put each paragraph into quotation marks and added the author name and page number after it. His own words are in brackets. When he begins to insert material from this source into his essay, he will be less likely to inadvertently present the source information as his own words. The full citation is at the top of the page, making it easy to prepare the works cited list, too.

Summing Up

Keep careful track of the sources of your research material, appending each passage with the citation. Start your bibliography immediately and develop a consistent system of distinguishing your own comments from the words you are quoting or paraphrasing. Use discretion in selecting passages, so that you do not simply delay the sorting process until later, but include anything that you might use.

CHAPTER 2

GENERATING IDEAS

2.1 Introduction

Generating ideas from your source material is the most creative, most fun part of writing an essay. Part close observation, part connecting the dots, this critical thinking stage engages activities that our pattern- finding brains find intrinsically interesting and rewarding. It requires both divergent thinking (generating many ideas and connections) and convergent thinking (focusing on a solution) to explore the range of possibilities and then to synthesize them to discover how the parts add up to more than the whole. It starts with making alert observations of concrete, undeniable, facts and truths about a text or topic. And it can help you arrive at a thesis that is often as complex and artful as the original text being analyzed. So allow plenty of time to enjoy the process.

Samuel Johnson said that "What is written without effort is read without pleasure." In other words, you cannot add anything new to a topic if all you do is amass found data into an ordered procession. Instead, think beyond and through the information to discover new implications — making inferences, accounting for context, piecing together disparate bits of evidence, noticing patterns, and drawing conclusions. Consider also what is not stated, and what underlying assumptions exist, as well as implications and consequences. Derive a working thesis and then test it by sifting through your materials for supporting and counter-evidence. You will expand your ideas when you do some free-writing to figure out what you think. All good thinkers think with a pen (or keyboard). See Chapter 3.1 on how to free-write.

2.2 For Literature Essays

Good fiction draws you into its world and makes you forget that you are reading. This creates a problem, though, because such reading is passive — you can lose the critical distance necessary to analyze how the piece drew you in, how it made you feel that its world is palpable and logical. If everyone had time to read literature twice through, once for enjoyment and once to look at it critically, analyzing literature would be a simple affair. But chances are that you don't have time to re-read assignments, so tuning your ability to notice the writer's craft as you read will not only make for a better analytical essay, it will increase your enjoyment, too. As you read, consider the deeper issues of character motivation, social context, the philosophical ideas underlying the text, and the events or ideas that are left out, as well as how the writing itself contributes to the meaning. This entails slowing down, but not to the point that you lose track of the main ideas of the text.

The goal of a literature essay is to derive your own theory about the work, to develop your ideas fully enough that a skeptical reader can be convinced, and to support your claims with many succinct and vivid quotations from the text. Usually you do not want to quote long blocks of the text, but if you do want to include a longer passage, make sure to balance it with equal commentary of your own about what it means.

Don't make the common mistake of equating the narrator with the writer. In fact, the narrator may represent a position that the writer considers reprehensible. Sometimes the author creates a narrator that serves as a puppet, presenting a viewpoint designed to provoke you into disagreement, which nudges you closer to the author's thinking. One hint of this possibility might come through the writer's tone, which may be arch, sarcastic, or falsely approving. Often there seems to be no "tone" at all — that the writer is simply relating a story objectively. But when you sense a "disconnect" between the story and the way it's being told, pay attention to the feelings being evoked, and try to identify the attitude that might be behind it. If you can describe the tone with precision, you have read insightfully and your essay will be the stronger for your deep thought.

Of course, what happens in the story matters, but in considering essay topics, look beyond the facts of the story to the art of the telling, and how it conveys the sense of the story. This involves addressing some of the elements that make up a work of fiction, such as the way that the setting affects the mood of the text. Consider how a gloomy atmosphere can suggest sadness, confusion, or foreboding, and look for similar kinds of setting clues in the text. Details about the characters — what they wear, how they move, what objects are associated with them — also reveal aspects of their inner lives and motivations. Your understanding of human nature can help to unpack gestures and actions, just as you would in real life. Think about how you would react in the same situation, and ask why the characters act and speak as they do.

Many adults have fond memories of English class. That is because fictional characters who act and move in fictionalized worlds can do more than entertain you, they can make you wiser. Their problems might be foreign to you, but as they suffer the consequences of their mistakes, they contribute to the growth of your judgment. So extract all the wisdom you can, by considering the moral and ethical implications of the story, by empathizing with the characters' motivations, and by probing the way that the writer's language manipulates your emotions. Delve into literary works as though your future soul depends on it, for in a way, it does.

Questions to Ask when Analyzing Fiction

Theme

• What larger idea or value lies at the heart of the work?

• What principles seem to be at stake?

Character

• If a character undergoes a transformation, what values also shifted?

• What influences contribute to a character's situation and decisions?

• Why did the character act or not act as you expected?

• What effect do minor characters and stock (stereotypical) characters have on the work as a whole?

• Is there a character who acts as a foil or opposite of the protagonist (main character) such that thinking of both of them reveals insights about the larger meaning of the text?

Plot

• Where does the action of the plot come to a point of crisis, departure, or change?

• How is the action of the plot resolved?

• How do choices in details contribute to the overall mood or sense of the text?

• What do deviations from a chronological telling contribute to the sense of the text as a whole?

• Are there instances of irony that raise expectations for one thing and produce another?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Anthem Guide to Essay Writing by Carole L. Hamilton. Copyright © 2011 Carole L. Hamilton. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Reading and Researching; 2. Generating Ideas; 3. Preparing to Write; 4. Structuring the Essay; 5. Getting Out the First Draft; 6. Revising; 7. Documenting Sources; 8. Developing Style; 9. An Overview of the Writing Process; Afterword and Recommended Reading; Appendix: Sample Essays; Index