Some Common Bad Advice (In Literary Writing)

1. Tell the examiners what they want to know

This advice, though sensible enough in itself, is generally taken to mean that there is a concrete body of information about the text under discussion which the examiners will expect to receive from every candidate. But so is not the case. There isn’t any particular viewpoint that can be agreed on by all and expected from all.

However, there is something the examiners want you to tell them. They want to be told something new and interesting and unexpected about the text, or failing that, something familiar expressed in a way that makes it new. You are much more likely to give them this experience if you say what you really think about the text, rather than what you think they think you ought to say.

2. Quote sparingly

This advice is wholly pragmatic one, and is based on the assumption that you will not be able to learn by heart more than three consecutive lines of anything. Since you will not be able to quote more than three consecutive lines of anything in a closed exam, you are urged never to do so under any circumstances.

But the truth is you should quote what will best serve to illustrate your point, neither more nor less. Sometimes a single phrase, or a single line of verse, will be enough. Sometimes you will need a whole paragraph or whole sonnet.

3. Never say I

This advice may spring from an exaggerated respect for humility, a feeling that it would be arrogant of the essay-writer even to acknowledge that he or she exist. On the other hand, it may be an attempt to bolster up the essay-writer’s view either by imitating the detachment of a scientific paper by writing entirely in the passive voice or by using impersonal pronouns such as ‘one’ and ‘we’.

But it is dangerous advice to follow, not only because of the risk of sounding pompous and impersonal but also because you will be prevented from making the distinction between what you personally feel and what most readers are likely to feel.

4. An essay should have a beginning, a middle and an end

An essay, like any other piece of writing, will inevitably have a beginning and an end, and what comes in between must obviously be a middle. But this statement is loaded with misleading implications. To say of an essay that it must have a beginning, a middle and an end is to say, in effect, that the middle is the real essay but that this naked middle must be made decent and acceptable by being dressed up in an Introduction and a Conclusion. The idea that an essay on literature must have an Introduction and a Conclusion leads the writer to sandwich the meat of the argument between two bits of low-fibre, pre-sliced paper prose.

Your opening sentences create the expectations, whether of enjoyment or of boredom, with which the reader approaches the rest of your essay. You closing sentences, simply by their position, are the ones which remain most vividly in the reader’s mind after the essay had been put down. If you remember this, and write with the sense that the argument of your essay stretches from its first sentence to its last, then your prose is much more likely to remain alive and interesting throughout.

(Source: Writing about Literature, Judith Woolf – The adaptation is Ramrowriter’s.)