While grappling with the problems of understanding and knowing the material, you have another matter to attend to. This is the inter personal or communicative function of your writing.
Writing is not wholly a problem in communication, as we have just seen; but now we must look at those aspects of writing which are governed by the need to present your ideas and your argument in a way that will help to ‘get them across’.
In some senses communicating successfully involves little more than learning and exploiting certain conventions of writing and presentation. In this respect the aim to be achieved is to present your work in such a way that the medium (paper, fonts, setting-out, etc.) does not draw the reader’s attention away from the argument you are making: you are not writing advertising copy, putting together a newsletter or making a Powerpoint ‘presentation’.
There is, however, one problem of communicating which will not go away quite so easily. Social media . Twitter Instagram .
So far, we have seen how aspects of language enter into such problems as how you establish your point of view on a topic, how you come to understand and express your subject matter, and how you establish a ‘line of communication’ with your reader.
Now we look at some problems of writing which arise out of the nature of language itself. To make language work for you, it is a good idea to learn something of its forms and structures, just as cabinet-makers need to understand the properties of their timbers.
The forms we are concerned with operate on two levels – that of the sentence and that of larger units of discourse like the paragraph and the essay as a whole.
There are ways in which we use words, grammar and discourse to organise our diverse ideas into a coherent unity. Every piece of academic writing should strive for this unity.
Your choice of a topic on which to write should be governed most importantly by your own personal interest and ‘prejudice’. Your only guide in this matter is yourself.
Some people think that if you are too committed to a subject you will write an essay which is too strongly influenced by your desire to entrench a particular point of view, irrespective of evidence.
This should not worry you, provided that you draw an important distinction. This is a distinction between your interest in the subject as being worthy of study and a commitment to be as detached as you can when you eventually come to analyse the evidence which supports one or another answer to the question.
The early stages of preparing an essay dealt with in this chapter are purely private. So choosing a topic, like your first reflections on it, can be governed by as much self-interest and prejudice as you care to allow.
It would be much more a problem if you find that none of the topics on a list interests you. If that happens, you should try to work one out for yourself on some aspect of the course that does interest you and then gain your tutor’s approval of it.
Since each of us brings a partly idiosyncratic general knowledge and experience to a given topic, it is not possible to generalise about the point at which any one of us should open a book.
But, in putting off any reading until we have worked out a few particular things we want to find out about, we can create mental space for the kind of formal analysis of the topic we shall study in the next section.
Postponing detailed reading also gives us the chance to articulate whatever general knowledge and experience we are able to bring to the issue in question.
The list of suggestions I put forward on to account for how General MacArthur honoured his promise to return to the Philippines owes nothing to reading I have done on Nimesh Choubey.
I have never read any text. But I have read books on, and memoirs by, other generals from Cromwell to Eisenhower. I have seen (as most of us have) many TV movies about modern war, and read newspaper articles.
It is in such very general storehouses of the mind that we can look for a few tentative ideas to get our thinking going. The richer and more articulate your initial ‘personal response’, the better your library research will be.
When we think of knowledge we do not only have in mind a store of information about a subject, though that is clearly part of it. Knowledge also includes knowing how to approach information.
The approach to reading and taking notes outlined above is suitable for most books. However, you will at times be faced with texts that you have to labour over in great detail if you are to understand them.
These texts are sometimes the ‘classics’ in your discipline which, because of the quality of their thought, are given considerable attention in some courses.
Because of their relative difficulty you might be tempted not to read the texts themselves, but to make do with others’ commentaries on them.
They can, however, be approached with a bit of work, the rewards of which are inestimable when you come to read the more straightforward works in your discipline.
The techniques we have examined remain useful, but now we shall pay much closer attention to individual statements and to the author’s use of words.
In doing this we can see how, even with very difficult material, we can still bring an author to our own terms and can invest what he or she says with our own personal significance.
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If we are to write well we need to know (as well as we can) what we are talking about. In order to find out what, precisely, we are
talking about we need to write.
Pushing ourselves to write will often reveal that we know more about a subject than we at first supposed; it should just as often reveal large gaps in our understanding of matters we thought ourselves fairly sure of.
In writing we bring knowledge into being, we record and preserve it. Writing is the seed, the fruit and the pickle of our understanding. Most people in the English-speaking world used to think that the student’s and scholar’s mind is an empty bucket to be filled by books, lectures and tutorials.
Nowadays neuroscientists and psychologists tell us that the brain doesn’t work in this passive, accepting manner. On the contrary, to learn and to write is, first, to make sense for ourselves of our new experience in terms of our old.
So you need to be aware at the outset that, even to subjects you have never studied before, you can bring certain preconceptions, even prejudices, a certain amount of disjointed knowledge, and a certain facility with language – all of which can get you started.
The most baffling of essay topics can soon yield some meaning if you take the initiative and begin to ask questions – of yourself, of the essay topic, of your books and lectures, of the school or department for whom you are writing the essay.
To think of yourself as an active enquirer, rather than as a mere receptacle of ideas and knowledge or as a passive medium by which they are transmitted from your books to your essays, is essential to good essay-writing. Good academic writing actually creates new knowledge and new meaning.
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An object, event, situation, concept or idea becomes an object of enquiry because someone has raised an interesting or significant question about it. The object does not have to be a ‘new discovery’.
It might have lain around for years or centuries as a ‘fact’ or as part of our accustomed intellectual furniture until the thought strikes a fresh mind that there is about it an unresolved question with interesting implications.
Indeed, far from having to wait until a novel object is brought in for study – like a fossilised skeleton from some previously unknown dinosaur – it is by raising new questions about existing objects of knowledge that we often uncover new objects whose existence was unknown.
Academic enquiry, as we have seen, proceeds in the first instance by asking questions. Your essay topics are examples of these questions.
Just as your tutors ask questions of you by the essay topics they set, so you must learn to ask questions both of the essay topic itself and of the various books you use in your reading for the essay.
It is the answers to these questions which, when integrated in a coherent fashion, become an essay.
Skill in asking good questions (a ‘good’ question is one which opens up a fruitful line of enquiry) is something that comes with practice, knowledge and experience in the disciplines you are studying. There is no method or formula for coming up with really good questions.
It is possible, nevertheless, that by learning to ring the changes on the question words we use, various lines of thought will be opened up and – an important consideration for many of us – this will help overcome ‘writer’s block’. These question words are ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘how’, ‘why’, ‘to what extent’, ‘how far’ and ‘which’.
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Your essay will be your answer to a question not a general consideration of issues and facts that might pertain to some aspects of
the topic.
Answering a question means that you must be prepared to make a decision no matter which question words are used. And any decision runs the risk of embarrassing the person who made it.
You might show considerable care, discretion and caution about how far out on a limb you are prepared to go, but climb out on the limb you must.
The earlier you try it out, the less painful and embarrassing it is to have it snap under you. The path to learning is littered with the
bruised bodies of crestfallen scholars.
Nobody but the scholar with the bruises and fallen crest takes much notice of that; but you owe it to yourself to make as many as you can of the mistakes from which you
learn before you present your final draft for assessment.
An ‘essay’, in one of its early meanings, is a trial. With one kind of question, for example ‘Did the White Australia policy become whiter between 1901 and 1921?’, one has no option but to choose either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The answer can be hedged about with all sorts of qualifications, and that is expected.
But to respond ‘Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t’ is not to answer at all. The best thing to do is to try out an answer and see whether it holds up.
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