Guidelines for Analysing an Essay

Before starting your analysis:

- make sure you know the text well: faults in the understanding may lead to logical flaws in your reasoning;

- decide on the most conspicuous features of the text: humour, satire, persuasion, insights into human character, philosophy of life, etc. – any of these (either alone or in combination) and many more, can come into focus in communicating the message, and suggest an effective approach to the analysis.

As you go on:

- build your analysis around the salient features of the text choosing between the points given below; do not try to cover all the points, yet do not ignore those that might show significance.

Your analysis should be:

- logical: each statement you make must be backed up with examples, and examples, in their turn, must be commented on; any commentary must be grounded by language facts;

- concrete: avoid general statements: always look for their concrete realisation in the text; for example, if you speak about the emotional colouring of an utterance, do not fail to specify the type of emotion: admiration, frustration, surprise, joy, bitter sarcasm, etc.;

- coherent: make smooth transitions from one point to another; avoid transitions of "as-for-the-composition..." type: they suggest a commitment to some universal scheme of analysis and rule out improvisation. Careful paragraphing (or pauses, in oral presentation) can be a sufficient means of moving from one idea to another;

- complete: give a short conclusion to sum up the pertinent observations you made in the process of the analysis.

SEMANTIC FOCUS:

- message

- type of exposition

FOCUS ON COMPOSITION:

- elements of composition (introduction, main body, conclusion)

- opening and closing techniques; techniques of development

focus on coherence

- patterns of coherence (theme progression, theme iteration)

- coherence markers (co-reference, cross-reference, transition devices)

LOGICAL FOCUS:

- types of reasoning / argumentation (deductive, inductive, causative, comparative)

EMOTIONAL FOCUS:

- imagery (metaphorical; descriptive)

- subjective modality

- level of formality

- expressive syntax

- expressive diction

PRAGMATIC FOCUS:

- references to shared experience

- deictic expressions

 

- Writing

1. Read the requirements for essay writing:

An informal essay may be defined as a natural instinctive flow of ideas, rather conversational in tone and personal in spirit. It is built around some central idea, which should be well formulated. This is the first rule for writing essays.

To write a good essay it is advisable to make up an outline first. The outline usually has three traditional parts: beginning, middle and end. Do not forget about the opening and closing lines, for they act as a frame that may either enhance the text or detract from it. Pay attention to the logical arrangement of the essay. To sound logical, make sure that you have formed your own opinion about the point in question. So, before starting the essay it is advisable to do the following: divide the page into two parts (vertically) and write down all the pros and all the cons. Then see which list is weightier and think how you can generalise. This makes sense as people quite often do not know their own mind and upon closer thinking turn out to have the opposite opinion from the one they thought they had. Having established an opinion, turn the valid reasons into topical sentences for paragraphs.

It goes without saying that the emotional involvement of the readers is vital for understanding and enjoying what they are reading. If you leave the emotional side out, even the most logical and well-grounded work will lack merit and interest. Do not forget about metaphor, simile and other image forming means. Remember that a sample without any imagery is utterly unreadable for it sounds primitive and disinterested. Yet, stylistic devices should only be used to clarify your ideas - and not to blur them.

Remember that brevity is "the soul of wit'. In case of essays this is a chief formal requirement.

Preserve the stylistic unity of the essay. Words should belong to the same stylistic layer and bathos is allowed only when it serves a concrete purpose. Don't try to stuff your writing with the latest colloquialisms and never use slang.

And - as a final recommendation - remember that it is good sense that makes your essay clever, witty and convincing. Good sense is, in a way, more important than anything else about an essay for if it is present even faults of the form may be forgotten.

2. Write an essay on one of the following topics. You may support or oppose the idea:

i. Too much knowledge is a dangerous thing.

ii. Teaching machines can never replace teachers.

iii. It is foolish to give money to beggars.

iv. Better non-taught that ill-taught.

v. No one would like to live to be a hundred.

 

 

Text # 3

The Sporting Spirit

George Orwell

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one would deduce it from general principles.

Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused. Anyone who has played even in a school football match knows this.

At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe - at any rate for short periods - that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.

 

Text # 4

Taking the Shame out of the Word 'Idleness'

Bob Wynn

Workers on strike or locked out, hate those headlines about so many thousands being "idle". There is an equal distaste for TV announcers who lovingly loll the word around their tongues.

Great grief! What is wrong with any man being idle? What has an idler to be ashamed of? Especially a well-occupied idler, whether he be digging the garden, or diligently sitting in a café drinking tea, watching the world hurry by.

Idleness is a truly happy state. In this age of technological abundance, what a healthier, wiser, and more economically sound nation we should be if only more of us were a damned sight idler. Lord Chesterfield may once have said: "Idleness is only the refuge of the weak minds, and the holiday of fools," but what can you expect of a man of his class? His lordship never made the mistake of being too busy himself. He found time to live, unlike the many more-dead-than-alive folk around today, who are hardly conscious of living except in the exercise of some soul-destroying job.

Robert Louis Stevenson was right when he declared: "Extreme business, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a strong sense of personal identity". It is during the hours of truancy that you really do something worthwhile, like learning to think, play the clarinet, cook and eat a good meal or repair a puncture in the bike. Like a good husbandman, I know the value of leaving the land to lie fallow. I know the value of a rest by a roadside hedge, in a meadow amid the browsing sheep or a drowse beneath the willows on the riverbank...

I hope that more people will join me in idleness, especially in the idleness of the senses of the eye, ear and lips. I hope too that for a long time after the first man has landed on the moon, and the moon has become a mere stop to all stations beyond, we shall all have time to loaf and dream, and enjoy life, the eating, drinking and loving of it.*

 

 

____________________________________________________________

* Here are some more opinions related to the point in question:

· "Absence of occupation is no rest. A mind quite vacant is a mind distressed," A. Pope.

· "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans," John Lennon.

 

 

Text # 5

On Not Knowing English

George Mikes

In England I found two difficulties. First: I did not understand people and secondly: they did not understand me. It was easier with written texts. Whenever I read a leading article in The Times, I understood everything perfectly well except that I could never make out whether The Times was for or against something. In those days I put it down to my lack of knowledge of English.

The first step in my progress was when people started understanding me while I still could not understand them. This was the most talkative period of my life. Trying to hide my shortcomings, I kept on talking, keeping the conversation as unilateral as possible.

The next stage was that I began to understand foreigners but not the English or the Americans. The more atrocious a foreign accent one had, the cleverer it sounded to me.

Once sitting in a news cinema, I was particularly irritated by not understanding a single word of the commentator. Not that I did not know the words: I was sure that I knew quite a number of them, but I could not spot any familiar words at all. I sighed to myself: "Good Heavens! Will there be, can there be, a time when I shall understand all this?"

Good old days! Today I sit in the news cinema, listening to an American commentator, thinking of the past days with longing and sighing to myself: "Good Heavens! Was there, could there be, a time when I did not understand all this?"

Yet, I shall never regret that I learned English as a grownup. Of course, there are gaps in my knowledge but I have one consolation. I am much more aware of the beauties of the English language than quite a few Englishmen.

I should like to mention only one characteristic of the English language which exasperated me at first but which I now find delightful. In English, the order of words follows very strict rules from which you cannot depart. If you do, your sentence loses not only its beauty and grace but also its sense. The result is that, in acceptable English, you can be stupid but you cannot be obscure.

In German - to mention one Continental language - you can write ponderous sentences, each two yards long, with a string of verbs at the end. It may sound impressive, profound and pregnant with ideas. Translate it into English and it is unmasked. If it has something to say, it will say it; if it has nothing to say it will resemble that pompous and conceited King of the fable who rode through the capital, thinking that he was wearing magnificent regal robes while he was, in fact, stark naked.

The English, it is said, are not prone to become dogmatic. How could they? Most dogmas and theories when translated into English lose their mythical haze and enigmatic charm and sound plain silly.

 

Text # 6

On Silence

Aldous Huxley

The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire - we hold history's record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.

That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babble of distractions, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but usually create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ear, through the realms of fantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego's core of wish and desire. Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood-pulp, all advertising copy has but one purpose - to prevent the will from ever achieving silence.

Desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify the workings of that force, which (as all the saints and teachers of all the higher religions have always taught) is the principal cause of suffering and wrong-doing and the greatest obstacle between the human soul and its Divine Ground. (1946)

 

Text # 7