top tips from the school of english

Clemency Schofield suggests the following:

1. When writing an essay, keep asking yourself 'How does this paragraph help to answer the question?' and 'Does this paragraph follow on from the previous one in a logical manner?'.

2. ALWAYS reread and carefully edit your essays. It is surprising how easily the marker is put in a friendly frame of mind by an essay that is free from avoidable errors.

Jérôme Ensch reminds us of these points:

'Make sure that you reference all the materials you use properly. It would be a good idea to consult the Handbook on how to quote correctly.'

AND

'Write down your argument, then demonstrate it with relevant examples from the text you are discussing. It adds emphasis to your point of view, is simply much more convincing and really an essential part of the whole argument.'

Rod Edmond advises: Students should be spare with their use of adjectives, adverbs and all intensifiers, so as to guard against overstatement, exaggeration and simplification.

In a similar vein, Sarah Wood suggests the following: 'Keep sentences to 25 words or less.'

Denise Jackson confesses: I struggle to write concisely – what do you struggle with? Identify your weak spots and work on them.

Emma Bainbridge suggests a practical and easy way to improve your writing: When you have finished writing your essay, give it to a friend to read. Ask them to skim through your writing, checking for obvious typos, loss of meaning, and suchlike.

Anthony Levings offers this extract from the Society of Freelance Editors and Proofreaders to help you with a frequently neglected aspect of grammar (don't be put off by the title!):

Gerunds and the Possessive Case:

A gerund is a word that can be used as a verb or a noun, usually ending in - ing.

• I am swimming (swimming is a verb)
• I like swimming (swimming is a noun)

This is straightforward and causes no problems. However difficulty may arise when a personal noun or pronoun occurs before a gerund. The rule is that this must be in the possessive. So the following are wrong;

• I cannot remember him borrowing the file.
• I hope you don’t mind me asking.

These should be:

• I cannot remember his borrowing the file.
• I hope you don’t mind my asking.

This makes sense if you think about what the sentence means: it isn’t him that you can’t remember, but his act of borrowing the file. I’m not asking about your feelings towards me, but towards my asking something (perhaps a personal question).

Ignore this when it becomes clumsy (in the plural):

• She resents Peter’s using the car.

But

• She resents Peter and John using the car.

And it isn’t necessary with inanimate objects:

• He encourages philosophy being taught in schools.

Christine Tsai offers this advice for Medievalists:

• There is no need to agree with all that you read unless you find it convincing.  Remember however to present your reasons for your disagreement, and either modify the propositions or offer alternative solutions. 
• Do not take all stage directions at face value without considering the practicality and the underlying symbolism.  Try and show insightful thinking about details. 
• The way to high marks is not via ‘repetition’ of what you may have heard in class or read in books, but via ‘dialectical debate’.  One way of enhancing your essay so that it stands out among the many is to remember that each individual is marked for his/her own research, as well as critical and original thinking.  One thing that markers don’t enjoy is reading the same tired quotation regurgitated across numerous essays. Show that you’ve taken the trouble to find out something for yourself – go a step further than the class discussion or lecture notes.
• Avoid overgeneralisation (For example, ‘all medieval churches are …’ or ‘all liturgical drama are…’).  Do not state what you are not confident of (‘perhaps’, ‘I think something might be so or might not be so’), and support your statements with other scholarly opinions.  Of course you could hypothesise, remembering of course to present your reasons for hypotheses; omit unsupported hypotheses.  Alternatively, put those in footnotes and express your interest to do further reading.

Keith Carabine offers the following sound (but often overlooked) essay advice: 1) Immerse yourself in the book (s) poems and find passages/quotations that fit the essay question BEFORE you read any  critics; 2) select the passages you want to discuss in the essay and build the argument through them; 3) when you have finished the essay read it again very carefully, correcting grammar and spelling, and deleting redundancies and repetition. Reading out loud helps.  

Ben Grant offers a valuable list of dos and donts for writing essays:

Paul March Russell passes on this advice (which he believes originates with Rob Pope)

Some things to remember when putting together an interpretation :

1. What is the basic situation of story? A few sentences should be enough to give you your bearings.
2. Would you call the text a ‘poem’ or a ‘play’ or a ‘novel’, or maybe a mixture? Identify the features which make the text ‘poetic’ or ‘theatrical’ or novelistic’.
3. Think of other texts you know which may be similar in some way. Maybe it fits into a category such as ‘tragedy’ or ‘mock-heroic’. If so, identify the ways in which it fits these categories?
4. Try to distinguish amongst the attitudes of the characters, the author’s attitudes and your own attitudes. This means looking at the different ‘points of view’ on offer, how do they work to shape meaning?
5. Identify the main issues. This may involve thinking about the text in conceptual terms such as gender, class, race and aesthetics.

Make sure you can analyze a representative sample of the passage for its style. This means being able to make sensible comments about the language used.

Once you have these six things sorted out you are in a position to develop a more detailed, sophisticated and fundamentally individual view of how a particular text is put together and why.

Scarlett Thomas has this to say about metaphors:

• Metaphor is used to make the text more meaningful to the reader; not less meaningful
• Do not dress up your prose with fiddly bits just for the sake of it.
• It has often been said that metaphors are used to describe something we don’t understand using the language of things we do. Who really understands love, or power – or the particular loneliness you feel after you have been rejected? Use metaphor when you really need it.
• Your metaphors have to be good!
• You should try to be as original as possible.
• Do not mix metaphors.

Caroline Rooney offers this advice on a frequently neglected aspect of writing: One thing I often find myself advising is 'Introduce everything you quote.' Other typical things: 'Write in sentences. Sentences make sense.' and 'Do not simply re-narrate the text.'

Lynne Rees gives this advice on creative writing:

1. Do it regularly.
2. Make yourself write. Don’t wait for ‘inspiration’.
3. Don’t try and control your first drafts. Let your creative mind have its freedom – be ridiculous, weird, vulnerable, honest.
4. When working alone, separate ‘creative mind’ and ‘critical mind’ work into different sessions.
5. Be generous to fellow writers – with your interest, time and support.
6. Be prepared to experiment.
7. Take yourself and your writing seriously, but not necessarily solemnly.
8. Writing makes you a writer.
9. Love the practice of writing before loving the idea of publication.
10. Give it time.

Sarah Moss wants to remind students that 'read' is a verb and not a noun.