Senior English Critical Writing Handbook - Selwyn House School

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THE STRUCTURE OF THE CRITICAL ESSAYPARAGRAPH DEVELOPMENT.Write paragraphs that develop their topics fully by means of supplying examples for allgeneralizations, explaining terms or situations, explaining meanings of difficult quotations,quoting from primary and secondary sources, or describing a series of events. Do not be contentto give only a single illustration of an opinion; if you do so, you will invite your reader to judgeyou as a writer without enough information or without enough wit to argue solidly. Please notethat paragraphs should not consist of a single sentence. The sentences that stand by themselves ina student’s essay are likely to be either the topic sentence for a paragraph that follows or theclincher sentence for a paragraph that precedes. The student has correctly intuited that thesesentences are more important than their neighbours, but he has not seen that, in fact, they belongwith their neighbours. The idea that a paragraph ought to have both a topic and a clinchersentence implies, of course, that it must consist of at least three sentences (the third being asentence that develops the topic sentence). Beyond that, how long ought a paragraph to be? Setas a goal to write four to eight sentences (50 to 200 words); try, within this goal, to avoid writingsuccessions of very short or very long paragraphs. Two to three paragraphs a page is about right.Topic SentencesTopic sentences ought to be opinions strong enough to support several developing ideas. Makesure your topic sentences are genuine opinions and not some such formulation as, “The firstexample of this motif occurs at I.vii.67-68.” That sentence offers no opinion; it merely locatessome lines in a play. To make it into a good topic sentence, one must change it into an opinionthat can be supported (and, incidentally, change the main verb from the weak is): “In the firstoccurrence of the sleep motif (I.vii.67-68), Lady Macbeth invites her audience to see drunkensleep as the temporary death of reason.”.NOTE: You must write a clearly-identifiable topic sentence (expressing an opinion that can besupported) for every paragraph you write.Developing SentencesMake sure that every sentence you write advances your argument perceptibly (the word“argument” here means the opinion expressed in your topic sentence). Do not make the mistakeso common in student papers of assuming that repeating yourself in different words is the sameas developing a paragraph. You must present examples, trains of reasoning, explanations, chainsof events; these details will be the real “meat” of your paragraphs-and of your essay as a whole.One of the most powerful ways of developing an idea is to introduce quotations. These ought tobe of varying lengths, from a single word or phrase to a whole paragraph—or sometimes, severalparagraphs. The primary thing to remember about using quotations is that they must form partsof your own sentences. Please note that inset quotations do not come at the end; instead, theycome in the middle of your paragraph. Quotations properly do so because they are,grammatically, parts of the sentences that introduce them.9
NOTE: Quotations are parts of developing sentences: they are neither topic nor clinchersentences. Hence, quotations that are long enough to inset (four lines or more in prose, two inpoetry) do not normally appear last in a paragraph.Clincher SentencesEvery paragraph must have a sentence that rounds off the paragraph in a final way, a sentencethat clinches the argument presented in the topic sentence and supported in the developing sentences.A clincher sentence must not supply supporting detail; it must return the reader to thelevel of the topic sentence. The paragraph that serves as an example in Section 2 above illustratesthese points clearly. The close relationship between the topic sentence and the clincher sentenceimparts to the paragraph unity and finish: one clear idea is stated at the beginning, developed inthe middle, and re-emphasized at the end.10
Page 1 and 2: CRITICAL WRITINGANDREADINGATSELWYN
Page 3 and 4: AcknowledgementsThis handbook was o
Page 5 and 6: How does this Venn diagram stimulat
Page 7 and 8: eing. If you really cannot remain i
Page 9: encapsulates the meaning of the ess
Page 13 and 14: stack consisting of cards about one
Page 15 and 16: explaining the technique of a liter
Page 17 and 18: THE FORM OF THE CRITICAL ESSAYFORMA
Page 19 and 20: Prose Quotations of Four Lines or M
Page 21 and 22: One scene of it comes near the circ
Page 23 and 24: THE ANALYSIS OF FICTION: A PROCEDUR
Page 25 and 26: In his book The Technique of the Dr
Page 27 and 28: (c) Foreshadowing. A foreshadowing
Page 29 and 30: Our opinion of a fictional characte
Page 31 and 32: SETTINGSetting includes (1) the gen
Page 33 and 34: The most important of these methods
Page 35 and 36: symbols, poetic description, allusi
Page 37 and 38: Appendix 1MLA CITATION STYLEThis gu
Page 39 and 40: Book by a corporate authorAssociati
Page 41 and 42: Dussault, Marc and Bruce G. Barnett
Page 43: Appendix 3Donald MacGregor, 11BEngl

Senior English Critical Writing Handbook - Selwyn House School

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