3.12 Guided Reading Questions: Writing Ess.ays about Literature, “Editing and Proofreading Your Ess.ay”
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A BRIEF GUIDE FOR UNIVERSITY
AND COLLEGE STUDENTS
Katherine O. Acheson
“I've been using Writing Essays About Literature in my courses for years now because it is by far the clearest, most direct, and most engaging explanation
of the processes of literary analysis. It explains through demonstration, taking readers through each step with the genuine curiosity we want to encourage
in our students. The revisions to the second edition clarify the steps students struggle with most: developing the thesis statement as part of the introduction
and then revising the thesis after writing the body of the essay.” —KYLEE-ANNE HINGSTON, St. Thomas More College
“I was especially impressed by the lively and approachable authorial voice in Writing Essays About Literature. Where students might be accustomed to start with a thesis and write an essay straight through from beginning to end, the book demonstrates a more nuanced writing process that is both inductive and recursive. It gives students the tools to do higher-level research and
thinking, and it concludes with sample essays that model those outcomes.” —SUNNY STALTER-PACE, Auburn University
“I am a student studying English and American Studies, and this may be a bit unorthodox, but [ wanted to say that Writing Essays About Literature was one of the best textbooks I have ever read ... You have done a brilliant job
making essay-writing easy, structured, and actually enjoyable!” —LAUREN GAYLOR, University of Kansas
This book gives students an answer to the question, “What does my professor want from this essay?” Using a single poem by William Carlos Williams as the basis for the process of writing a paper, it walks students through the processes of reading, brainstorming, researching secondary sources, gathering evidence, and composing and editing the paper.
Writing Essays About Literature is designed to strengthen argumentation skills and deepen understanding of the relationships between the reader, the author, the text, and critical interpretations. Its lessons about clarity, preci- sion, and the importance of providing evidence will have wide relevance for student writers. The second edition has been updated throughout and pro- vides three new complete sample essays showing varying approaches to the final essay.
KATHERINE O. ACHESON is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo and the editor of the Broadview Edition of Lady Anne Clifford’s Memoir of 1603 and Diary of 1616-19.
broadview press www.broadviewpress.com
WRITING
ESSAYS
ABOUT
LITERATURE
WRITING
ESSAYS
ABOUT
LITERATURE
A Brief Guide for University
and College Students
SECOND EDITION
Katherine O. Acheson
BROADVIEW PRESS
BROADVIEW PRESS - www.broadviewpress.com
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Founded in 1985, Broadview Press remains a wholly independent publishing house.
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© 2021 Katherine O. Acheson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, kept in an information
storage and retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as expressly
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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Writing essays about literature : a brief guide for university and college students /
Katherine O. Acheson.
Names: Acheson, Katherine O., 1963- author.
Description: Second edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200393804 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020039391X | ISBN
9781554815517 (softcover) | ISBN 9781770487987 (PDF) | ISBN 9781460407479 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Academic writing—Textbooks. | LCSH: Report writing—Textbooks.
| LCSH: Essay— Authorship—Textbooks. | LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—
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Broadview Press handles its own distribution in North America:
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Tel: (705) 743-8990; Fax: (705) 743-8353 email: [email protected]
For all territories outside of North America, distribution is handled by Eurospan Group.
Canada Broadview Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada for our
publishing activities.
Edited by Martin R. Boyne
Book design by Michel Vrana
PRINTED IN CANADA
For Mary Osler, Katherine Stevens, and Gladys Guest,
who taught me most of what I know about words.
Contents
Section One: Introduction 1
CHAPTER ONE: THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE 3
Literature: Instruction, Delight, Imitation 5
The Literary Essay 7 Evidence 7
Communication 9
Subjectivity 11 How to Use This Book 15
Review Questions 15
Section Two: Research and Analysis 17
CHAPTER TWO: RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT 19
Taking Notes about Literature 20 Recording Your Responses to the Text 21
Do I Like the Work? 21 What Words Stand Our? 22
What Feelings Does It Give Me? 24
Do I Identify with Any of the People Represented? 26 Is There Anything about How It’s Written That Stands Out? 28 What Is the Work about? 31
Conclusion 33
Review Questions 34
CONTENTS
CHAPTER THREE: USING REFERENCE WORKS 35 The Oxford English Dictionary 36
Etymology 37 Definitions 39
Examples of Usage 42 Scholarly Editions 45
Encyclopedias 50 Conclusion 52
Review Questions 53
CHAPTER FOUR: RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS 55
Topics for Research: Social Phenomena and Literary Movements Useful Resources 59
Using Your Findings 60 Conclusion 66 Review Questions 67
CHAPTER FIVE: RESEARCH ABOUT THE CURRENT
CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS 69
Finding Critical Works 71
Assessing Publications 71
Using Bibliographies 72 Reading Critical Works 76
Taking Notes from Critical Readings 79 Conclusion 82
Review Questions 83
CHAPTER SIX: INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT 85 Arranging Your Evidence 86
Reviewing Your Labeled Evidence 86 Categorizing Your Evidence 87
Charting Your Evidence 90 Conclusion 96
Review Questions 97
VIII
56
CONTENTS
Section Three: Composition 99
CHAPTER SEVEN: COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT 101 Inductive Reasoning 102 Composing the Thesis Statement 103
Writing the Subtopic Sentences 103 Composing the Body of the Introduction 105 Concluding the Introduction 107
A Variation: An Essay without Secondary Sources 109
Conclusion 113
Review Questions 113
CHAPTER EIGHT: WRITING THE BODY OF THE ESSAY
The Body Paragraphs 115 Features of Strong Paragraphs 119 Writing the Conclusion and Revising the Introduction
The Conclusion 120
Revising the Introduction 122 Conclusion 122
Review Questions 123
115
120
Section Four: Polish and Presentation 125
CHAPTER NINE: EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY 127
Conventions of Essay-Writing Style 128
Diction 128
Vocabulary 129 Connecting Words 130
Common Grammatical Errors 131
Apostrophes 132 Demonstrative Pronouns 133
Pronoun Agreement 134
Verb Tense 135
Common Errors in Punctuation and Sentence Structure 136
Semicolons 136
Comma Splices 138 Sentence Fragments 139
Subordinating Conjunctions 140
CONTENTS
Conjunctive Adverbs 143
Conclusion 144
Review Questions 145
CHAPTER TEN: DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES
AND PRESENTING YOUR WORK 147
Reasons for Documenting Sources 147
Documentation Practices 149
Presenting Your Work 151 Layout and Order 151
Illustrations 152
Multimedia and the Literary Essay 153
Exemplary Hlustrations 154 Complementary Illustrations 155
Supplementary Illustrations 156 Last-Minute Checks 157
Conclusion 158
Review Questions 159
Section Five: Conclusion and Review 161
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE PROCESS OF ESSAY
WRITING—A SUMMARY 163
Collecting Evidence (Chapters 2-5) 163
Categorizing Evidence (Chapter 6) 164 Writing Your Thesis Statement (Chapter 7) 165
Troubleshooting the Thesis Statement (Chapter 7) 165
Writing the Body Paragraphs (Chapter 8) 166 Concluding Your Essay (Chapter 8) 166 Proofreading (Chapter 9) 166
Documentation and Presentation (Chapter 10) 167
Conclusion 168
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE 169
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO 177
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE 189
WORKS CITED 203
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENT 207
SUBJECT INDEX 209
Section One
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
The Purpose
of an Essay about Literature
THERE ARE TWO QUESTIONS INSTRUCTORS IN LITERARY
studies dread hearing from students. The first is “did we do any-
thing important in the class that I missed?” This is what we call a
loaded question: I have to agree to premises that put me in a pos-
ition I don't want to be in. An example of a loaded question is “Do
you always burn the toast?” To answer this, I need to agree that I
have been burning the toast. To answer the question about what
was missed in class, I have to accept the possibility that nothing
important happened (or that something did but I'm too cranky to
repeat it for the student). The instructor perceives this question as
a challenge to their talent or to the inherent interest of the course’s
subject matter. But I understand, when I get this question, that the
student is asking if the missed class presented something that they
need to know to do well on the graded components of the course, so
I usually mention those and then ask the student to find a classmate
who is willing to share their notes.
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
The other question is “what do you want in this essay?” This
question is more complicated. It’s loaded too, though: it implies that
there is an ideal essay tucked away in my head, and a clever student
can get a glimpse of it if I let down my guard or if I like the student
personally enough to give special attention to them. There’s a whole
bunch that’s whacky about that set of implications. One, there is no
ideal essay. Two, if there were, I wouldn't have it hidden away in the
darker recesses of my brain; I'd have it out on the table for every-
one to see. Three, my desires, whims, or even ideas, and the extent
to which your essay reflects them, are not what the assignment is
about. So the answers I give to this question are always a bit kooky:
I say, “I want to be enlightened and moved” or “I want to make no
corrections to pronoun agreement” or “I want to discover the secret
of eternal life” or “I want to finish grading before the end of the
holidays, or at least soon thereafter.” Or I can be more helpful and
say that I want a clearly written argument, based on evidence, about
the meaning, power, or structure of the work or works the essay
discusses. Yes, let’s repeat that—a clearly written argument, based on
evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of the work or works.
That’s what teachers really want.
In my courses, I'm quite careful about letting students know
what I want and how to accomplish it. Grading is one of the most
valuable things I do for students, and I would hate for them to think
that I don’t have objective and measurable reasons for evaluating
their work in the way that I do, that there is no rational process to
assessing an essay. I give them a breakdown of what’s important
for written assignments and what the weighting of each category
is. And I'll go over in class how to get from beginning to end in
the essay-writing process and how to write the best possible essay.
There is a method to writing a good essay, and there are clear and
manageable steps to take from start to finish. That’s what this book
is about. For those of you who already know how to write great
essays, I'm sorry to have to take the mystery out of the process; you
know the secrets, and I'm going to blurt them out here. It’s about
sharing, and that’s good. And we can all learn something new, how-
ever proficient we already are. We all want to have AHA! moments,
and writing a great essay will give you more than one.
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
LITERATURE: INSTRUCTION,
DELIGHT, IMITATION
Literature is as complex as an ecosystem, as ineffable as the sub-
atomic world, as rich and beautiful and interesting as the many
cultures around us. It is shaped by the world, and it shapes our
understanding of the world. It is made from language, an infin-
itely malleable and sinuous medium. It can be found in the simplest,
most naive forms and the most carefully crafted; its authors can be
children with few skills or geniuses who have worked for years to
hone their art. Literature in English is read all around the world
and has been central to advanced education for hundreds of years.
Literature is powerfully ideological; it can be subversive, oppressive,
or any combination of the two. Literature comforts us, frightens
us, brings us to tears, creates bonds, and opens up possibilities for
our imaginations. The reasons we study literature—the reasons we
write essays about literature—are to try to understand better what
it gives us, how it reflects, enlarges, and critiques what it is to be
human in this world, or these worlds, of ours.
Literature’s principal purposes are different from those of
other systems, and those differences shape how we approach it.
From classical times until the present, literary critics have been
in agreement about what literature does. The first thing that lit-
erature does, we believe, is to instruct its readers. Instruction can
come in many forms, and a huge range of information, values, and
ideas is conveyed in works of literature. The author may intend us
to learn certain things, but we can also learn things that the author
or authors didn’t plan on us knowing. Those things can be about the
society that the work depicts—that it is prejudiced toward women,
for example, or that its religious values permeate all of the things
that happen in it. They can be about the ideas that are represented
in the work: we might perceive that the scientific ideas of the pro-
tagonist are related to their ideas about art, related in a way that
the author didn’t consciously intend us to perceive. They can be
about the material world in which the story is set: we can make
connections, as readers, between certain objects and ideas, between
things and feelings, that also help us to understand more about the
world, the characters, and the action that is represented in the work.
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
It may be important to you to distinguish between intended and
unintended effects: it’s always interesting, for instance, to read what
an author says they were trying to do in a work and measure that
against what you think actually got done. But because the medium
of literature is language, because readers are individuals in particu-
lar cultural and social situations, and because works of literature
are read in different times and places, much of the effect of a work
of literature is out of the control of the author. These are reasons
we keep going back to the same texts: they are never quite the same.
And the enduring freshness of literary masterpieces also means we
have endlessly interesting questions about what complex works of
literature mean, which is why we keep on writing essays!
The second purpose of literature, we agree, is to delight its audi-
ence. Delight means to cause pleasure, so the effect is emotional.
But the emotions that give us pleasure are not just joyful ones: we
can take pleasure from sadness, for example, or from terror. Why
else would we pay to see tear-jerkers and horror movies? One of
the things we value most in art and entertainment is intensity of
emotion; as a species, we like a good cry, a rush of adrenalin, a belly
laugh, a shiver of fear. Psychologists and neuroscientists may be
able to tell us why; perhaps rehearsing emotions that help us take
action or communicate needs is just as important as staying in good
physical shape. Perhaps reading literature, watching plays and films,
and listening to music are as essential to our well-being as vitamins
and minerals. But what we as students of literature focus on is what
the emotions are, how they are produced by literary works, and how
they are related to other things in works of literature and in the
worlds in which they were produced and are read. As with their plan
to instruct readers, authors may intend us to have certain emotions,
but their works may produce emotions that are well in excess of
their plans, or opposite to their intentions. These are all fair game
for literary critics—of whom, I think I forgot to tell you, you are one.
The third purpose of literature is to imitate life, to produce for
the reader a believable version of a world that is or that could be.
This might be an internal world (the thoughts and feelings of one
being, usually a person, but sometimes an animal or even an object),
or it might be the world of a set of people in a culture or of a whole
society. It might be a real world that has existed or does exist, it
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
might be a fantastical world inhabited by outlandish creatures with
magical powers, or it might be an ideal and imaginary world in
which perfectly beautiful beings possessing the essence of being-
ness float effortlessly above the drossy world we inhabit. Literary
critics are interested in how authors build worlds and in how read-
ers experience these worlds. We are interested in the opportunities
and limitations that different kinds of worlds offer to the kinds of
ideas and feelings that can be produced within them. For instance,
science fiction can offer a different understanding of the human
body and a different experience of its capabilities than can an eight-
eenth-century realist novel set in a small village in England.
But we are also interested in how authors make worlds out of
language. If you think about this art, it’s like making a house out
of ice or a dress out of sand or a dessert out of cauliflower—there’s
magic involved in taking symbols, scribbles on a page, and turning
them into something colorful, believable, sensuous, vibrant, and
captivating. Much of what literary critics do involves examining the
craft of literary construction: Why does this word work better than
others? What is the effect of this way of representing thought or
conversation? Why does this point of view make the emotional con-
tent more powerful? Literary critics are experts in how literature is
made—in how the choices authors make and the experiences read-
ers bring to works produce the rich, beautiful, and varied worlds
that inhabit the pages of the books we read.
THE LITERARY ESSAY
Evidence
A couple of pages ago, I said that the task of a student assigned to
write an essay about literature is to present a clearly written argu-
ment, based on evidence, about the meaning, power, or structure of the
work or works. The previous section has given us a bit more detail
about literature and about why we are interested in the meaning
(the “instruction”), the power (the “delight”), and the construction
of the work or works (how it “imitates” the world it represents).
The rest of this book will be about the other terms in that sentence:
how to collect and use evidence and how to write a clear and cogent
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
argument from that evidence. But let me say a few things about
those two right now, by way of introduction.
Literary studies is an evidence-based discipline, just like sci-
ence, law, or medicine. If you are a doctor, your patients will list
their symptoms to you, and you will try to pull those together into
a plausible explanation that identifies a cause for the effects they
feel. If you were a police detective, called to the scene of a crime,
you would collect clues—a stray hair, a bloody knife, a used glass—
and then try to put those and other bits of information together in
order to produce a story that explains the body, the robbery, and the
mysterious symbols painted on the mirror. The symptoms and clues
you are analyzing, as a literary critic, are the ideas and feelings pro-
duced by the work of literature and the things that are used to make
it—the words. From this evidence, you will produce a narrative that
offers an explanation for the effects the work of literature has.
If you think of yourself as a detective or a doctor and you
examine the work of literature and its context for clues, you too
can diagnose the patient or solve the crime. I'll repeat myself: the
study of literature is based on evidence, and its findings are argu-
ments built from that evidence. The arguments must account for
all the relevant evidence—there’s no extra gun floating around, no
additional ache or pain that’s not explained by the illness you've
decided on. That’s how we know it’s an adequate diagnosis of the
illness or solution to the crime. Equally, all the evidence used to
support the argument is necessary to the argument and is the best
possible evidence that can be brought to the argument.
A large part of the assessment of your essay will depend on
the quality of the evidence you collect, and another portion of the
assessment of your essay will depend on how well you construct the
explanation from it. These features are more important than the
actual topic that you go after. Sometimes, at least in my experience,
students think that I'm looking for them to find a certain mean-
ing in a work or experience a particular feeling—that doing these
things is key to unlocking the mysterious ideal essay I'm supposedly
keeping safe and secret in my brain. But that’s not what I value in
a student’s essay, or in an essay by a colleague or peer: I'm looking
for well-gathered evidence pulled together in a compelling and con-
vincing argument. Even if the essay topic is set for you, the value of
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
what you have to say about the topic will depend on the power of the
clues you gather and the persuasiveness of the argument you make
out of them. Because of the importance of evidence and argument
in literary studies, much of this book is devoted to how to conduct
research in and about the literary works that you read and how to
build an argument from that evidence.
Communication
Clear writing is a challenge for us all. It’s a challenge for me, and, as
an English professor, I'm basically a part-time professional writer,
so sometimes I feel like it shouldn’t be as hard as it can be! But essay
writing doesn’t need to be frightening or even difficult; there are
methods to the development of clear writing, and we will look more
closely at those in later parts of this book. It should help to know
that literary essays are about concrete evidence: once you have the
evidence assembled and have organized it into the building blocks
of the argument you want to offer, all you have to do is tell the story
of the evidence. It may also help to remember that you are writing
about your evidence and your argument. Your argument is about
the work of literature, but one important thing to avoid in writing
about literature is plot summary: do not forget that you must tell
the story of your argument in your essay, not the story of the work
you are writing about.
The key to clear writing is to write clearly. How's that for clar-
ity? Not very good: that sentence ends where it begins and begins
again where it ends. But the point is this: there is no secret fix
for effective writing. Writing is about words and putting them
together. If you want to write clearly, you have to choose the words
that mean what you want to say. Choosing words that you think
might mean what you want to say is not good enough. You may
want to use a dictionary to make sure that the words you are using
mean what you want them to mean. If you think of yourself as
a doctor or a detective, you'll realize that precise vocabulary is
essential to getting your point across, explaining how you've diag-
nosed the disease or solved the crime. We could also compare essay
writing to other kinds of writing. For instance, if you are writing
an instructional manual for how to assemble a piece of furniture ...
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
well, apparently those people didn’t go to the same school you are
going to. But if you are a poet or write short stories, you'll know
that there is an exactly, precisely, beautifully right word for what
you are trying to say, and you’ll know the wonderful, tingly, calm
feeling that comes when you find it. That’s what we're looking for:
words that make us feel strong, safe, gorgeous, happy, enlightened.
The right words in a good sentence can do those things, for both
writer and reader. Try it, and try it again: you'll see. You might get
hooked, though—so be careful.
I said “the right words in a good sentence,” and good senten-
ces are the next most important thing about writing clearly and
effectively. Good sentences begin with solid grammar. Again, you
want your sentence to say what you want to say. If it doesn’t do that,
then you need to work it through again. We'll go over some com-
mon grammar issues later in the book, in Chapter Nine, but the key
again is to imagine that it is essential that you convey your meaning,
and only your meaning, to your reader. A detective or a doctor can’t
be ambiguous, that is, offer up statements that can be understood in
more than one way. Life depends on it. As literature is as important
to us as safe streets and good health, it’s absolutely key that you get
your grammar right in your sentences. Lives depend on it! I'm jok-
ing, but I'm not. I honestly can’t imagine what it would be like to be
human without doctors, detectives, or literature. Pronoun agreement
(when “this” or “it” or “she” agrees with the noun it is standing in
for) and the proper use of apostrophes are not decorations: without
them, we would never really know what people are trying to tell us,
and never really understand ourselves. Run-on sentences are hard to
read: they are like streams that divide and never come back together,
and your reader won't be sure which path to follow. Sentence frag-
ments are frustrating—they offer, but they don’t deliver. When you
frustrate, confuse, or delay your reader, you undermine the effective-
ness of your writing and the quality of the story you are telling. If
your essay (and the grade it can earn) is important to you, you must
use correct grammar and good sentences.
Paragraphs and the shape of the whole are also important to
effective writing in essays about literature, and we’ll go over them
in greater detail in Chapters Seven and Eight. For now, let me just
repeat that you are telling a story. Stories have beginnings, middles,
10
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
and ends. They keep readers engaged throughout by moving from
one point to the next at a brisk pace. They may hover over a detail,
but it’s an important detail; the reader will see, maybe sooner,
maybe later, that this detail is key to the power of the story. These
will all be qualities of an excellent essay. Because of the importance
of clear writing, much of this book is devoted to the composition
of your essay.
Subjectivity
In preparation for writing this book, I've looked through a lot of
books, pamphlets, and online guides about writing essays. There’s
a terrible untruth repeated in some of them: that the grading of
essays is in some measure “subjective.” By this, the writers mean
that the mood, personality, and likes and dislikes of the instructor
(whether for people or for ideas) somehow influence how they judge
your essay. This may well be true, but it shouldn't be. That kind of
subjectivity in a teacher—or in anyone with the power to judge,
rank, and assess—is a form of incompetence and is not acceptable.
We all have our weaknesses as teachers, let’s be honest, and we are
only human: for sure, we sometimes suffer bad moods, and we may
like or dislike individuals. But we work very hard to ensure that
those feelings (and any other stresses that we have) do not affect
how we evaluate student work.
I've team-taught a number of courses over the years, and one
of the exercises we do as teachers is to calibrate our grading. We'll
both mark the same essays and then compare the grades. My co-
teacher and I always discuss beforehand what we value in essays,
what our objectives are, and we always make sure that students
know what those are. Every time that I've done this, there are very
few essays that my co-instructor and I don’t agree on. In fact, I can
only remember one instance in which the grades were more than
two points apart. My co-instructors have different moods, different
likes and dislikes than I do, different approaches to life, literature,
and even teaching. But we agreed beforehand on what was valuable;
we communicated those values to the students; we kept them in the
front of our minds as we graded; we agreed. Our grading, that is,
was not subjective in the sense that students sometimes believe it is.
11
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
Students also tell me that reading literature and writing
essays are both subjective. By this I think they mean that, if I judge
what they are saying in an essay or how they read and write about
literature, I am in some way imposing an assessment on their per-
sonalities, their likes and dislikes, their feelings and inclinations. I
would never want to do that, and I hope that I never have done it.
But I'd like to clarify here the ways in which reading and writing
about literature are subjective and the ways in which they are not.
I think it will help you to write your essays and to understand the
assessment process.
There are two meanings of “subjective” that are relevant here.
The first is the one we've been using above. “Subjective,” in this
sense, describes something that is based on personal opinions or
feelings and not on verifiable external facts. If I were to give you
a bad grade on an essay because I didn’t like the way you dressed
or because I thought that you didn’t like me (you never laugh at my
fantastic jokes!) or because I'm cranky and mean-spirited (especially
on weekdays), then I would be being “subjective” and—I think—
incompetent as a teacher. If you were to write an essay that said
unsubstantiated but feeling things about a novel that you just didn’t
like because it didn’t have any romance in it or you didn’t under-
stand the language or you were upset about something in your real
life outside of literature, you would be writing subjectively. As a
teacher, I'd have to say you were really not doing your job as a litera-
ture student: the detective can’t let his dislike of violence turn him
away from the crime scene, and the doctor can’t let her pain and
sadness prevent her from telling patients the truth. Your feelings
and opinions that are not grounded in evidence from the works you
are studying do not have a place in your essay. In this respect, essay
writing is not subjective but objective.
But, in another way, reading and writing about literature are
certainly subjective. One of the most dynamic qualities of literature
is that it means different things to different people. Each person’s
experience, knowledge, and interests are unique to that individual.
One of the most fascinating areas of literary study is the analysis of
reception through history—people didn’t always idolize Shakespeare,
for instance. And even when they did admire his works, they adapted
them to the ideologies, tastes, and interests of their times. Our
12
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
experiences of literature are similar: we bring what we are to the
works. You are an individual subject. When you read a work of litera-
ture and talk and think and write about it, you bring your experience,
knowledge, and interests to meet the material you are studying. This
conjunction is one of the most powerful experiences we can have, and
most of us remember one book or another as formative: it changed our
lives. Your essays are about the experience of being you, reading the
works you've read, describing the thoughts that you've had as a result.
Your perspective is an invaluable and essential part of the
essays that you write. The essays you write will be accounts of what
you have seen, thought, and felt as a result of the literature that you
have read and about which you are writing. The ideas, perceptions,
and feelings that you will convey in your essay are rooted not just
in you but in your encounter with the work of literature. So you
can show your reader where and why and how you had the idea,
perception, or feeling you did, in the text (the evidence). And you
can analyze your reactions to the text and show that analysis to
your reader (the argument). In producing evidence for your feelings,
insights, and thoughts from the text and in constructing an argu-
ment, you are able to share those feelings, insights, and thoughts
with your reader. You know very well that if you tell someone what
your feeling is—sadness or happiness or frustration—they can’t feel
it. They need you to tell them why you feel that way; they need
examples, experiences, observations before they can empathize. It’s
the same in an essay: you have to point to evidence, explain your
feelings in words, share your ideas, and persuade your reader to
share your point of view. In this sense, writing essays is all about
subjectivity—or rather about subjectivities. It’s about sharing your
subjective experience with other subjects, helping them see what
you see, think what you think, and then, possibly, feel what you feel.
As a person, | am also an individual subject, with particular
desires, preferences, and ways of dealing with the world around
me. But I’ve had lots of experience as a teacher (even the newest
teacher has had decades of education and years of practice). What I
bring to the classroom, and what I bring to grading, is my “teacher-
subjectivity.” If 'm a good teacher, I've revealed to you in the course
what my desires, preferences, and ways of dealing with things are as
a teacher. I've told you what the learning objectives for the course
13
SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION
are, I've given you some arguments that I think are persuasive about
the texts we are studying, and I've adjusted those, or strengthened
them, in response to your comments and questions. I've given you
a detailed outline of what I want in an essay and shown you the
relative importance of each component: I've told you that the qual-
ity of your argument will be worth more or less than other aspects,
that how you handle evidence, how you write sentences, and how
you document your sources will be worth a certain proportion of
your grade. These preferences are the result of my years of teach-
ing experience, of my objectives as a teacher, and of my interaction
with students over the years. So yes, it’s subjective, grading—I am
a human being, and I bring to the texts we read and the essays I
grade a set of inclinations that are unique to me. But a good teacher
will have explained to you what they want, and why, and will have
shown you much of how their teacher-subjectivity works in lec-
tures and discussions. And a good teacher will always be willing to
explain your grade, based on the evidence of your essay and the cri-
teria he or she has put forward. Finally, a good teacher will always
be willing to make an adjustment to your grade based on persuasive
evidence that they have misjudged your work.
Our subjective experience as human beings is the great topic
of literature, from the beginning of writing to the present. Sharing
that experience subject to subject is what writing essays is all about.
But sharing means communicating: it means finding the words for
the feelings you have, reinventing the experience of your insight for
your audience, and using logic to persuade your reader that yours is
a valuable, meaningful, and interesting point of view. In this sense,
writing essays is a template for the most profound of human experi-
ences: communicating with another engaged and articulate person
what you find moving, valuable, interesting, clever, brilliant, tran-
scendent, joyful, tragic, enlightening. We might say that our goal as
literary critics is to treat our subjectivity, and that of others, object-
ively—to study what it is to be human, to have language, to share
with others. This is why we read, and it’s why we write. We can
learn to read more carefully, write more clearly, and communicate
more strongly an objective view of the complex subjective inter-
actions that make literature what it is.
14
THE PURPOSE OF AN ESSAY ABOUT LITERATURE
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book is designed to help you write the best essays you can
write. It is my firm belief that every student who is a competent
reader and writer can write an A-level essay. The best way to make
sure that happens is to work from evidence to argument. If you fol-
low the model described in the following chapters, you will need to
take many notes from the works you are focusing on in your essay,
and you will need to keep a list of ideas that come to you as you
do your reading. You will also have to reread both the text you are
working on and the notes you make from it. But, by the end of the
evidence-gathering process (by the end of Chapter Five), you will
have everything you need to write a first-class essay. The remainder
of the book will help you arrange and connect your evidence so as
to craft a persuasive, even beautiful, argument.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What do teachers want in an essay?
2. What does literature do for people?
3. Why is a doctor or a detective a good metaphor for a
literary scholar?
4. What are the most important qualities of writing for an
essay about literature?
5. How is literary analysis subjective? How is it not
subjective?
15
Section Two
RESEARCH AND
ANALYSIS
CHAPTER TWO
Research
within the Text
IF THE DISCIPLINE OF LITERARY STUDIES IS EVIDENCE BASED,
where do we find the evidence? How do we know it when we see
it? How do we keep track of it? This chapter will outline how to
collect evidence from the first and most important source you have
for your essay: the work you are writing about. (You could be writ-
ing an essay about more than one work, but, for this chapter, we’ll
just say “work.”) All literary criticism, however far afield it ranges,
starts and finishes with the literary text about which it is concerned.
For the purposes of this and the next three chapters, I'm pre-
tending I've been assigned a four- to six-page essay (1,200-1,800
words) on a poem of my choice from the works I've studied in my
imaginary literature course. I've chosen a short poem by William
Carlos Williams. It’s quite commonly anthologized, and you might
have read it before. But reading it again won’t take long. (One of
the things to get used to in literary studies is not just reading but
rereading. We always reread, and short works such as this can be
reread many times.)
19
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
This Is Just To Say
William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which 5
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.
Forgive me
they were delicious 10
$0 sweet
and so cold.
(By William Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909-1939,
copyright ©1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.)
TAKING NOTES ABOUT LITERATURE
In this chapter, we will discuss how to guide your reading of works
of literature so as to help you produce evidence on which to base
an essay. I recommend that you make careful notes about your
responses and make a record of the parts of the text that inspired
your response. I know that this will take time, but, I promise you,
it will be time well spent. Date your notes, give headings such as
the questions we will use below, and copy out quotations from the
text (making sure to note the pages and line numbers accurately).
This material—the combination of your responses and the basis for
them—will be the foundation of your essay.
It takes time to write essays. If you don’t keep track of the
evidence you collect now, you'll have to go back and find it later.
There are few things more frustrating than searching for a line ora
sentence you know you've read but can’t remember where. It’s like
looking for your keys or your glasses; you know they're in the house
20
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
or your room, you know you saw them somewhere, but, for the life
of you, you can’t remember where. Taking the time to keep good
notes from your reading will save you time later. Actually, writing
things down helps fix them in your mind and makes your subse-
quent consideration of the evidence more fruitful. So take notes,
either by hand or using your computer or phone, and keep them
handy. Careful attention, close reading, and detailed notes will pay
off when it comes time to write your essay.
You can take notes however you like. It helps to have them in
a form that lets you easily find something and that you can easily
rearrange. I tend to keep my notes in files on the computer. When I
take notes, I make sure that the heading of the file includes all the
bibliographic information I'll need if I use the notes in an essay. I
am careful to take down as much of the quotation as could possibly
be useful, knowing that I am not certain, as yet, how [ will use it or
how much of it will be useful. And I make sure to include the page or
line number in parentheses after every quotation, even if there are a
few in sequence from the same page. That way, if I cut or copy notes
to somewhere else, I will retain the information that I need to docu-
ment them. Finally, and I think most importantly, I label notes with
key words that will help me locate them and organize them again.
RECORDING YOUR RESPONSES TO THE TEXT
Do I Like the Work?
Your first impressions of a work of literature are valuable starting
points for your analysis of the work. Let’s begin with a simple ques-
tion: “Do you like it?” You probably do like “This Is Just To Say”; it’s
so short and sweet, delicious even. It’s easier to write an essay about
a work that you like, not just because the work will be more pleas-
ant but also because the critical task is immediately clear: you can
analyze why you like it. That analysis could well create the basis for
your essay. If you don’t like the work ... well, you can try to read it
again, knowing that lots of people have liked it for quite a while. If that
fails, you can figure out what you don’t like about it. Whatever your
level of affection for the work, this first feeling can really help you get
started on collecting evidence. So make a quick note about your very
21
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
first feelings about the work, and label it with the date or a title such
as “first impressions” to remind you that these could be your opening
thoughts toward an essay, a presentation, or an exam or test question.
GUIDING QUESTIONS
These questions can help you organize your response to a work
of literature. Keeping track of these responses will give you
valuable evidence to use in your essay.
- Do I like the work?
- What words stand out?
- What feelings does it give me?
- Do I identify with any of the people represented?
- Is there anything about how it’s written that stands out?
. What is the work about?
. What else is the work about?
What Words Stand Out?
Our next question is about the vocabulary of the poem. Literature is
built with words. When you read literature, you should be conscious
of the fact that the author chose each word carefully, just as a painter
chooses a color. For most of the works you will study, you can assume
that the author has chosen words successfully: each word, and no
other, best conveys their meaning exactly, works best with the other
words in the text, and has associations or connections to other words
that add to the meaning, power, or construction of the work.
When Hamlet asks whether it is “nobler” to suffer through
life’s pains and troubles than to commit suicide, he means nobler,
not better or higher or braver or smarter. If you look up “noble”
in a dictionary, you'll see why Shakespeare chose that word and
what the consequences are to the sense of the passage and to our
understanding of Hamlet’s character. “Noble” suggests he is talk-
ing not just about what’s best for a human to do but also about
what’s most fitting to his station as a prince, what’s most praise-
worthy in the eyes of secular and spiritual powers higher than he
is. These meanings remind us that he is a very elevated person
22
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
with special responsibilities in his society and that he answers to
authorities that are both earthly and heavenly. The other words
that might fit in the line don’t convey those additional meanings.
At this point in your reading, you just want to make note of the
words that strike you as especially important to the work you are
studying. You don’t need to think too much right now about why you
select the words that you do—that’s for a later phase of our work. In
fact, you want to make note of words whether you think there’s any
reason for taking note of them or not—trust your instincts. Think
of yourself as a detective or scientist: you need to open your mind,
suspend your preconceptions, and collect anything and everything
that’s of interest. If you decide beforehand what you're looking for,
you are guaranteed to miss some important pieces of evidence.
In “This Is Just To Say,” you might have noticed “plums,” “deli-
cious,” “sweet,” and “cold.” What a great set of words; if they were
foods (and they aren’t, even “plums” —they are words), we'd say they
have terrific flavor, powerful scent, and fantastic mouth-feel (a great
phrase that chefs use to describe the combination of texture and
flavor that can make the experience of eating all the more enjoy-
able). You might also have noticed the word “icebox,” which may be
unfamiliar to you and gives a sense of when the poem was written
and its setting. Another key word is “forgive,” which is suggestive
of the emotional tenor of the poem and the nature of its communi-
cation. Flag these words in the text and any others that you think
are interesting. For example, “I” and “you” are very common words
and unlikely to reward a dictionary search, but they are key words
in this poem because they contribute distinctively to how the poem
works. They emphasize that the poem is an act of communication
between two people, so they are key to how the poem works and
what it is about. List the words and their line numbers in your notes.
USE A DICTIONARY
Words are the building blocks of literature. Use an online or
paperback dictionary to look up words that you haven't heard
before or can’t define for yourself. In the next chapter, we’ll
talk about how to use larger dictionaries as research resources.
23
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
What Feelings Does It Give Me?
The next question we are going to ask ourselves is what kind of
feelings the work invokes in us. For me, there are four kinds of feel-
ings that I have in response to “This Is Just To Say.” One is sensual
pleasure because of how evocative the poem is about eating plums,
especially ones that come right out of the fridge. The poem vividly
reminds me of that experience, which I have also had: the blueness
or redness of the plums (though in my mind they are blue), the slight
dusting of silver on their surface, the resistance of the skin as I bite
through the plum, the too-cold feeling of its flesh, the sweetness
of the juice, the hardness of the pit, and my manipulation of the
fruit as I eat around it. The memory is sensual, in that it involves
my senses, and pleasant; it may stimulate my appetite and have me
moving toward the fridge. It’s that strong!
The second is the feeling that is conveyed by the speaker’s
apology and their request for forgiveness: it’s an awareness of the
potential for moral or psychological reflection. The exact nature
of this feeling will depend on the reader. Whatever your reaction,
because the feelings associated with transgression and remorse
are associated so closely with the rich sensual experience of eating
the plums, both are intensified. Myself, I feel more naughty than
bad, and I'm confident that forgiveness will be forthcoming for the
speaker, so I don’t feel much remorse or grief—a little, but not a lot.
But that’s me—you may have a more fully developed conscience!
Third, I have a feeling of witnessing an act of intimate com-
munication between two people who love each other: I feel a little
as if T am eavesdropping. This sensation is quite like the feeling that
eating the plum is naughty; both feelings result from doing some-
thing that is irresistible yet perhaps wrong, something for which
I feel remorse but not quite enough to stop me doing it again. The
words that make me feel like an eavesdropper include “icebox” and
“breakfast”; it’s as if I'm looking into someone’s kitchen at a time of
day when guests are unusual or usually unwelcome. You may have
different feelings—perhaps you feel part of the relationship, as if
the note is written to you, because that accords with your experi-
ence and memories the best.
24
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
The fourth feeling is one that I often have when I read poetry.
1 don’t know if you'll have this feeling. It might be the result of my
training, experience, and profession. I'd be interested to know what
feelings you have that are related to your own history! What I often
feel when I read great works of literature—especially a poem such
as this one, which is so short yet so moving and interesting—is
awe and wonder: I'm amazed that anyone can take words and craft
them into such a vivid, affective, beautiful, provocative expression.
It’s like making stained glass out of sand, growing a tree from a
seed, or building a sonata from the keys of a piano: it’s an amazing
permutation of everyday things into something unique, beautiful,
and powerful. This feeling isn’t based on a set of words I can extract
from the poem but rather on the whole, on how it has made me feel
the other feelings I have had and on my vision of the imaginary
world of the poem and of the people who inhabit it—all this accom-
plished in the space of 28 words!
In my notes, I'll write down a few sentences or phrases about
each of these, and I'll try to attach the feelings to parts of the poem.
My notes might say “sensual experience” and quote the lines that
have given me that feeling; “remorse?” and the words that relate to
that feeling; “intimate communication” and the evidence for that
from the poem; and “beautiful” and a summary of my reasons for
feeling that way. As you can see, the notes you take will help you
reflect on why you have the feelings you do, and they will provide
you with support for your analysis of those feelings. Those notes,
that is, are the bridge between your reading and your essay, so I'll
repeat: take the time to make them.
LITERATURE AND FEELINGS
Your feelings are personal, and you don’t have to share them.
But thinking about the feelings that literature provokes can
lead to insights about the literature. Feelings can lead to
thoughts, and thoughts are what essays are about.
25
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Do I Identify with Any of the People Represented?
How many people are represented in this poem? Let’s start with
two: the speaker and the person to whom they are speaking. These
are conventions of poetry; a poem is considered to have a “speaker,”
and that speaker is speaking to someone, if only to themself. The
speaker in this poem is the one who has eaten the plums, enjoyed
them, and is, in the present of the poem, asking for forgiveness
from the other person. Do you identify with the speaker? The
second person in the poem is the person to whom the speaker’s
words are addressed. This person is the spouse or housemate of the
speaker. Can you imagine yourself in their position? It’s an inter-
esting exercise: Do you feel that person is long-suffering or part of
the fun? Do you think she or he really cares about the plums? Are
they touched by the note, amused by it, or annoyed by the actions
it describes?
Your identification with one or the other person in this poem
depends partly on who you are and partly on how the writer has
created each person. Examining the poem for the reasons that you
identify with one or the other of the poem’s characters will show you
more about how the poem works. One of the great mysteries studied
by literary scholars is how authors create believable characters out
of words, people who appear to have thoughts, feelings, interactions,
ideas, impulses, and conflicts—just like real people. Yet, more so
than real people, they encourage us to learn about ourselves, our
lives, and human beings and their worlds.
There are more people implied by the poem than just the char-
acters it represents. There is, for example, the person we imagine
to have written the poem. The speaker is a spontaneous, loving,
mischievous, or even naughty person who, when scribbling the note
that begins “This Is Just To Say,” probably had plum juice dribbling
down their chin. William Carlos Williams, I am quite certain, was
not dribbling plum juice when he wrote this poem; he produced
the poem after some reflection, and he may have edited it later for
publication, even if he experienced the raw material for the poem
firsthand. Even though the form of address in “This Is Just To Say”
is so direct and unmediated that we imagine the author’s self is
26
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
pretty close in being to the speaker’s self, we know that they are
not identical. We can refer to the person we imagine writing the
poem as its “implied author.” And we can identify with that person:
we can imagine having that experience and trying to turn it into a
poem. We can imagine selecting the words, placing them in relation
to each other, polishing it up. Again, this identification can give us
insight into ourselves; it can also help us to look at the poem from
the writerly perspective, as an illusion of a human interaction cre-
ated by the artful arrangement of words.
Finally, poems and stories have implied readers, and plays have
implied spectators. Occupying that role means being conscious of
your role as reader in creating the meaning of the poem. In “This
Is Just To Say,” the fact that we seem to be overhearing (or over-
reading?) an intimate, playful, emotional communication between
two people is produced because we are positioned by the poem in
a certain way. Even if we had no intention of eavesdropping—even
if we'd be uncomfortable doing so in real life—we can’t help but
realize that we have done so by the time we've finished reading the
poem! Our experience of the position of the implied reader also
helps us to appreciate the construction of the poem, and may lead
us to think about what the author wanted us to get out of it: we
may realize, for instance, that much of what we learn about how
relationships work, and how communication happens and why, is
from reading, watching, and listening—rather than through direct
experience. In this, as in so many ways, literature has a valuable
lesson for us.
IDENTIFICATION
There are many reasons we identify with people, in real life
and in literature. We feel that we share something with them
and, therefore, can see a little bit from their point of view. We
can be surprised by which characters we identify with and why:
often we identify outside the boundaries of things we think are
basic to our self-definition, such as our gender, our religion, or
our cultural background.
27
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Is There Anything about How It’s Written That Stands Out?
The next question on our list is about technique. Sometimes we
think of technique as the specialized use of resources that belong
to a discipline, for which we have a whole vocabulary. You've heard
some of the words that we use to talk about poetry: alliteration, allu-
sion, enjambment, for instance. Alliteration means the repetition
of consonant sounds; allusion means the reference to another work
of literature; enjambment means separating the components of a
grammatical unit with a line break, which can produce ambiguity or
irony. But we don’t care about things with fancy names at this point.
What we want to notice in our first impressions is anything about
how the writing is done that influences what we think is going on,
what the poem means or makes us feel.
In “This Is Just To Say,” the poem is written in the form of a com-
munication from one person to another, in the style of a note that is
left on a kitchen table or stuck on the fridge. These features reinforce
our perception that the poem is part of the ongoing interaction
between two people in a close relationship; exploring them can help
us understand how the poem is built and, therefore, how it achieves its
effects and meanings. The first thing we probably take note of, when
we think of how “This Is Just To Say” is built, is that it doesn’t really
seem like a poem to us: the note on the kitchen table is not a poem.
This is interesting: a poem that is trying to sound like not a poem!
In my list of first impressions, I'll write down the features
of the poem that make me think that it is like ordinary, everyday
communication—and not what we usually think of as a poem. First,
“This Is Just To Say” has a very basic vocabulary and doesn’t refer
to literature or philosophy or theology, just to everyday things
and events: “icebox,” “breakfast,” and “plums” are not rarefied or
esoteric words. While I'm thinking about this, I might also note
that there are certain kinds of words that are not part of “This Is
Just To Say.” There are no words of more than three syllables, for
instance, and only two words that have three syllables; it is not
written for an educated audience that might be thought to have a
wide-ranging vocabulary and education in what students like to call
“flowery” language. There are other features of the vocabulary that
28
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
are interesting: for example, the poem uses the definite article “the”
rather than the indefinite article “a/an,” even though we are able to
elide (or omit) the definite article with a plural noun. Saying “the
plums” and “the icebox” instead of “plums” and “an icebox” points
to a specific material reality, showing that the poem is more about
things than it is about abstractions.
The sentence structures and grammatical choices are also inter-
esting. The first sentence begins “I have eaten”; this is what's called
the present perfect verb tense, and it is often used to describe an
action that was completed in the past but remains true to the present
moment. The action is part of history, not part of the continuous
present, but, usually, when the action happened is not as important
as the result of the action: e.g., I have taken that course or passed
that exam. You might not know how to label verb tenses, but you do
know how to use them in conversation and, probably, in writing. It
may help to contrast “I have eaten” with choices the author could
have made but didn’t, such as “I eat.” If they had said “I eat,” the
action would be characterized as ongoing (which might pose some
problems as diction is usually impaired by talking while you are eat-
ing). Also, the speaker might seem to be someone who reflects on all
their actions and explores them for their significance. “I rise from
bed, I approach the icebox, I open the door, I remove the plums, I eat
them” is less about direct communication with another person and
more about a person’s acute, and perhaps excessive, preoccupation
with themself. “I have eaten” is a report from one person to another.
The other sentence in the poem begins with “Forgive me,”
which is in what we call the imperative mood: it asks or commands
the listener to do something. It can be used by a man talking to
himself, for example, but even then it presumes there is some dif-
ference between the speaker and the listener, even if that listener
is the same person as the speaker. (That sounds quite complicated,
but, if you say “come on!” to yourself when you are biking up a steep
hill, you are speaking as if there’s part of yourself that can motiv-
ate the other part—you are speaking as if you are different from
yourself! And that difference is the basis for communication.) Both
of these aspects of the sentence structure underline that this is a
communication between two people and that the intention of the
communication is to describe action and transact emotion.
29
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
I'm beginning to think that “This Is Just To Say” is trying to
tell us something about poetry, not just about plums. Perhaps it
lacks those big-word features of poetry not by accident but as part
of its desire to unsettle the difference we assume between ordinary,
everyday communication and Poetry with a capital “P.” Does “This
Is Just To Say” want us to see instruction and delight in all kinds of
communication, in every conversation, every piece of correspond-
ence, every stray note and scrap of our daily life in words? Does it
suggest that, if we keep our eyes and ears open, if we make ourselves
ready to perceive, to feel, to speak, we can enjoy the world in the
same way we can enjoy great poetry?
My notes on the technical features of “This Is Just To Say” may
be more copious than yours; I've been trained, after all, to recognize
these things, and I've read an awful lot of poetry in my time. But
if you are careful to read every word of the work (especially when
studying a short piece such as this poem), you will be able to see
these features, even if you don’t know the technical names for them.
In your day-to-day life, you know the difference between a definite
article and an indefinite article, and you make use of those differ-
ences in the way that you talk to others. You can ask your teacher or
a classmate what these things are called if you notice them, or you
can just describe them in your essay as best you can. But, believe
me, if you or any other student were to analyze in an essay the effect
of the definite articles in “This Is Just To Say” on the meaning or
power or structure of the poem, I would be mighty impressed and
interested. So take notes about how things are said and the kinds of
words that are used, and think about how those choices shape the
way that the literature you are studying works. Again, careful atten-
tion, close reading, and detailed notes will pay off when it comes
time to write your essay.
TECHNIQUE
Technical features of literary works are fun to analyze. It’s like
watching amazing athletes and thinking about how they can
do what they can do, all the tiny adjustments, capacities, and
efforts that make their performances superior and even unique.
30
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
What Is the Work about?
Finally, we are ready for this question. You'll notice that I've put it
after the others about our first impressions, even though it’s often
the thing we want to know first. This is because I really want you
to try to be open to the text rather than going at it with a sense of
what it’s about. In my experience, as a literary critic myself and as
a teacher, deciding what a work of literature means too early in my
evidence-gathering process limits the evidence I gather to material
that supports what I think the work is about. Also, what I think the
work is about on first reading or—worse—because of its reputation
or just from its title is bound to be narrower and less interesting
than what the complex and multifaceted work is really about. If I
read Hamlet, or see a production, just seeking clues to how and why
the lead character delays or whether he loves his mother too much,
I'm bound to miss much more than I notice.
That said, our very first impressions of the meaning of a work
are important to keep track of, and you could write them down now.
Grasping the surface or immediate meaning of a work of literature
is essential to understanding how its complexity and depths work.
My first reading of “This Is Just To Say” tells me that it is about
some plums that the speaker ate and that they are asking another
person, who seems to share an interest in or right to the plums,
for forgiveness. You probably said something like that too. You are
unlikely to forget this part of your reading, now that we've made
a point of noticing it, but write it down anyway: your essay might
well take shape in relation to it. For instance, many essays are struc-
tured around a difference between the surface meaning of a work
of literature and the deeper meanings it contains. In this case, your
essay might begin by saying, “On the surface, ‘This Is Just To Say’
is about some plums, an icebox, and two people, one of whom ate
the plums the other one was saving”; then the essay might continue
with an exploration of the deeper meanings and their relationship
to this surface meaning. Deeper meanings are not necessarily more
important or interesting than surface ones. In the case of “This Is
Just To Say,” for instance, you might want to write that the sur-
face is the most important part of this poem, that our desire to see
deeper meaning in everything is exactly what the poem thwarts:
31
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
» « the poem, like the plum, is “delicious,” “sweet,” and “cold,” and
it may want us to savor its taste and not worry about its digestion.
But works of literature typically have more than one dimension of
meaning, and essays often explore the relationship between them.
Before answering the question of what the deeper meanings of
the poem are, I'd like you to look over your notes from the previous
questions. Read over the key words you've listed, the feelings that
the poem has given you, your notes about your identification with
one or more of the people represented in the poem, and the list
you've made of its technical features. We're going to go back to our
evidence from our close reading when we construct our argument
in Chapter Six, but, for now, let’s see where we are.
Let's summarize here what I recorded during my close reading.
[uy I like the poem.
2. The poem’s vocabulary includes concrete nouns (“plums”
and “icebox”) and expressive adjectives (“delicious” and
“sweet”) that suggest it is about the real, material world.
and “you”), indicating that it
represents an act of communication between two people.
4. It gives me the following feelings:
a. sensual pleasure
“1” 3. It uses pronouns (
b. awareness of potential for moral reflection
c. awareness of overhearing an intimate communication
d.admiration for the poet
5. Irecognize four people represented in the poem with
whom I identify:
a. the speaker
b. the person to whom the note is written
c. the poet
d. the implied reader
6. It includes the present perfect tense, the imperative
mood, and definite articles. These affect the kind of
communication the poem represents: it’s a story about an
action that’s already complete, it asks or commands the
spouse or roommate to do something, and it is oriented to
the material world.
32
RESEARCH WITHIN THE TEXT
7. It follows the form of a note between two people rather
than a poem. And, according to this form, it uses everyday
language, even though it’s a poem and poetry traditionally
uses elevated language.
My notes include all the lines and words that support these obser-
vations. Reviewing them makes it clear to me that “This Is Just To
Say” is not just about some plums, an icebox, and two people, one
of whom ate the plums the other one was saving. There are three
statements that I'm prepared to make now that I think might lead
further as I make progress on my essay.
1. “This Is Just To Say” is about sensual, moral, and
interpersonal experience in the material, everyday world.
2. “This Is Just To Say” is about relationships between people
and about how these relationships are shaped by the use of
language.
3. “This Is Just To Say” is about poetry and how it is different
or the same as everyday acts of communication.
Those statements are based on my close reading of the poem and on
a review of my notes about that reading. For most essays or for writ-
ing an essay-style answer on an exam about this poem, I've done
half the work I have to do, so being patient and taking careful notes
have been well worth it. I can now proceed to explore any further
avenues of research I think are interesting, or I can go straight to
organizing my evidence and ideas into an argument. My close read-
ing has taught me a lot about how “This Is Just To Say” instructs,
delights, and imitates life in its twelve short lines.
CONCLUSION
Your first impressions are very important. Your ideas will change
in the course of your research, and you may even revise some of
your initial ideas. But many of them will stay with you and gain
in richness and complexity as you gather more knowledge about
the work you are writing about. Taking the time to make your first
impressions explicit and to express them in sentence form helps
33
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
clarify them and can often help you consciously build on them as
you continue your work toward your final essay.
Students often like to discuss their ideas for an essay with their
teachers, and teachers sometimes require that they do so. In my
experience, I can be most helpful to a student once their reading
and thinking is at this point: the student can clearly state what their
ideas are and can support those ideas with evidence from the text,
if they are ones I haven't thought of before. At this stage, I can use
my experience and knowledge to help make connections, suggest
arguments, and offer leads for further research more easily than I
can if the student has less specific thoughts to offer. If you like to
consult with your instructor, or your instructor requires you to do
$0, now is a good time.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Does it matter if you like the work of literature you are
studying?
2. What are some of the ways in which a writer can generate
feelings in their reader?
3. Why are technical features important to our study of
literature?
4. Why is your first sense of the meaning of a work important,
even if it’s not quite “right”?
5. Is all literature about the writing of literature, in one way
or another? Why is this interesting or important?
34
CHAPTER THREE
Using
Reference Works
AFTER OUR CLOSE READING EXPERIENCE, OUTLINED IN
Chapter Two, we might have further questions that we’d like
answers to before we proceed to writing our essay about “This Is
Just To Say.” I'm curious, for example, about whether any of the
words we've noticed can be considered symbols—nouns or phrases
that have abstract as well as concrete meanings that have developed
over time. I'm also wondering how this poem compares with others
by Williams—perhaps there are plums in other poems, perhaps he
wrote more than one poem in the form of everyday communication,
or perhaps he often represents intimate relationships. I'd sure like
to know what an “icebox” is and when they were used. I'm motiv-
ated to learn more about Williams himself and about his career as a
writer. I'd like to know if this poem was much noticed when it was
first published, for example, and whether Williams was well known
as a poet in general. For answers to these questions, I'll begin—and
possibly end—with reference works.
35
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Reference works are publications that include generally accepted
facts and interpretations of historical and scientific information.
They aren’t always right, and they never contain the whole truth
about a topic (we can’t have everything right all the time, and we
never know everything there is to know about something), but we
trust these sources to give us answers that are plausible to experts
and scholars around the world. Reference works are the first place to
go if you are going to do research outside the text. The information
they contain can be matched up easily with the evidence you have
already collected and used to strengthen your essay when you write it.
How can you tell if a reference work is reliable? If it’s in your
library or available virtually through your library, then that library
has endorsed it—not as containing the gospel truth but as a credible
and reliable source for the kind of information it contains. Works
that are recommended by your instructor should also be considered
dependable. If these endorsements aren’t available, then look for a
reputable publishing house (you can search for it on the web, read
about its history, and check out its other publications), and try to
find editors and scholars with expertise in the area (you can search
their names, either on the web or in specialized databases that we
will explore in Chapter Five).
In this chapter, we’ll look at how to get evidence for your essay
from three kinds of sources: the Oxford English Dictionary, schol-
arly editions of the works of the author that you are studying, and
encyclopedias. These three types of sources will be invaluable to
you as you continue your studies.
THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
The OED, as it is called, is one of the most important basic resour-
ces for the study of English literature and the English language.
It is normally available in university and college libraries in both
printed and electronic forms. The print version is 20 volumes long
and takes up a whole shelf in the library. The electronic version is
easily accessible, and there is a tutorial within it to help you learn
to use it. The library staff will also be happy to help you learn to use
this rich resource. It’s not hard, and it will help you write essays in
English studies and in other humanities disciplines.
36
USING REFERENCE WORKS
FORM AND FUNCTION
Make sure you get the right “part of speech” or grammatical
term when you look up a word in the OED. Many, many words
in English can be both nouns and verbs or nouns and adjec-
tives, for example, without any change in spelling: “plum,” for
instance, is both a noun and an adjective. (“Plumb” is a verb
and an adverb, so someone who has plumbed the depths of
the ocean can be plumb tuckered out.) Can you think of other
words that have multiple functions?
The OED offers three distinct perspectives on individual words that
are helpful to us. First, it tells us the etymology or origin of the
word. Second, it gives us definitions, with great precision. Third, it
illustrates definitions with examples from written works, including
literary, philosophical, historical, and legal works as well as news-
papers and magazines. Using the online version of the OED makes
gathering evidence extremely easy.
Etymology
English is a hybrid language, based on Saxon or Old English (a
Germanic language) but with influxes from French, Greek, and
Latin. When the Normans conquered England in 1066, they brought
their dialect of French with them. Between the eleventh and the
early fifteenth centuries, French was the language of the court, the
government, and the law. In fact, each of those three words—“court,”
“government,” and “law” —comes directly into English from French.
To some degree, there is still a class division between Saxon-rooted
words in English and French-rooted words: some people eat lunch
at home, for instance, and others eat supper at a restaurant. Words
of Saxon origin are often of one or two syllables, and they often sig-
nify the basic needs of life: “home,” “love,” “hearth,” “food,” “fight,”
“sword,” “stone,” “wood,” and so on. Anglo-Norman words tend to
be longer, and they often signify social customs and practices, status
and reputation, and material goods beyond those that are essential
to survival: “festival,” « aristocrat,” and “fork” are all examples.
37
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
SUGAR IN YOUR COFFEE?
Words imported into English from Arabic include “candy,”
“coffee,” “giraffe,” “guitar,” “lime,” “rice,” “sugar,” and “zero.”
Some of these things were commodities that were traded;
others were part of the knowledge that got traded with sugar,
coffee, and rice. The words came with the traders, travelers,
scholars, and diplomats from many different countries who
spoke Arabic and other languages and used Arabic words when
communicating (about giraffes and candy, over a cup of coffee!)
with non-Arabic speakers. After the invention of the print-
ing press in the mid-fifteenth century, the absorption of these
imported words into other languages was accelerated.
» «
Because education and information in the Renaissance were
international, English also absorbed many words from languages
such as Latin, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic between 1500
and 1700. Greek-rooted words in English came with Greek texts that
were circulated in the Renaissance; as Greek knowledge of architec-
ture, medicine, philosophy, and astronomy was considered the best,
our current vocabularies for those topics are words of Greek origin.
Law and politics were areas of Roman expertise, and the words that
we use in those areas come from Latin, whether they entered dir-
ectly from Latin texts or from Latinate (or Romance) languages such
as French. So every word in English has a history. Literary writers
are often aware—sometimes unconsciously—of these origins and
make use of them when they choose their words. In “This Is Just
To Say,” for example, the prevalence of short words of Saxon origin
(“sweet,” “cold,” “plum,” “I,” and “you”) reinforces our sense of the
poem as being about the material world and about basic relation-
ships within that world between people and things and between
people and other people.
The origin of words may satisfy your curiosity more than it con-
tributes to your essay directly, but it is always worth remembering
that English is a relatively young language (compared to Arabic,
Urdu, or Farsi) that is international in origin. The international fla-
vor of English connects it to history in a very concrete way: giraffes
38
USING REFERENCE WORKS
were icons of the exotic, signaling the great differences between
landscape, climate, and culture between England and Africa, and
the appearance of this word in late-sixteenth-century English shows
that the exchange of knowledge and goods between faraway lands
was well underway by that time. The history of the word “sugar” is
a microscopic version of the trade in one of the world’s most import-
ant commodities, a trade that led to the enrichment of nations, the
enslavements of peoples, and the development of European colonies
around the world. “Bungalow” and “khaki” are words that come
into English as a result of British imperial rule over India during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The histories of words are
great stories in and of themselves, and they may help you untangle
the dense thickets of language that literary writers sometimes weave.
HWAR BEOP WE
(WITH SOMETHING THAT LOOKS LIKE A SHOVEL?)
I also notice, as I'm sure you will, that Old English (OE) is a
different language altogether, with different letterforms! It’s
something you would have to be taught to read. It’s a good
adventure, learning Old English, but not something you are
expected to be able to do to make use of the OED. It is interest-
ing and meaningful when authors choose words with OE roots,
and you don’t need to be able to pronounce the OE words to
make use of this fact. (By the way, “hwar beop we” can be
translated into more modern English as “where we are.”)
Definitions
The definitions of words can change and multiply over time. The
OED records all the known definitions of English words. The elec-
tronic version is updated frequently, so new definitions of old words
and new coinages are added often. You'll be surprised by how many
definitions most words have: try looking up “pen,” “desk,” “paper,”
or “book” to see that the common props of student life have rich
and varied meanings. I can’t stress too much what a great treasure
trove your language is, and the OED puts it all on display.
39
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
“Plum,” one of the key words we've identified in “This Is Just To
Say,” is a pretty straightforward word. If we look first under “plum,
n.and adj.” in the OED, we’ll find that the word is Germanic and that
the first meaning is just what we think it is from the poem: an edible
fruit “usually having purple, red, or yellow skin with a dull powdery
bloom when ripe, a sweet pulp, and a flattish pointed stone.” The
word can also refer to the plum tree or to the wood of the plum tree.
There are a couple of other definitions that might or might not be of
interest. For instance, perhaps Williams wanted a word that could
also mean “a coveted prize; the pick of a collection of things” (“plum,
n.” 5¢c)—the plums in “This Is Just To Say” are clearly the most desir-
able things in the icebox. I don’t think he meant “testicles,” which is
another definition, as saving them for breakfast doesn’t really make
culinary or cultural sense. If there were other words in the poem that
implied body parts or genitals (or if “rocks,” “ » nuts,” “balls,” “stones,”
or “family jewels” also appeared in the poem!) I might think again
about this definition, but I don’t see anything like that, so I will
discard that definition as a possible one.
TURDUCKEN? NO THANKS
The day I wrote this section, the front page of the electronic
OED featured four words newly added to the dictionary: “bail-
out,” “car-booter,” “rechallenge,” and “turducken.” These
words aren’t necessarily brand new: in fact, for “bailout,” the
entry shows that the word was used as early as 1939, with the
same meaning it has today. By the way, a “turducken, n.” is
a “poultry dish consisting of a boned chicken inside a boned
duck which is in turn placed inside a (partially) boned turkey,
along with seasoned stuffing between the layers of meat and in
the central cavity, the whole typically being cooked by roast-
ing.” Perhaps that makes your mouth water and your stomach
rumble; I won't join you on that one, either at dinner or supper!
One of the definitions of “plum” that intrigues me helps to
explain to me why the plums I imagine the poem to be describing
are purple, rather than red or yellow, both perfectly acceptable colors
40
USING REFERENCE WORKS
for plums. Definition #7 for “plum” is a “reddish-purple colour char-
acteristic of some plums.” This does give me some insight into the
poem. Banana, apple, pineapple, gooseberry—those are not colors.
“Plum” means both the fruit and the color of some of the fruit; my
imaginary plum is purple because the color plum is purple. Williams
has chosen a fruit that is more readily visualized than others, one
that therefore appears concrete and real to the reader. As concrete
and real are both qualities of the scene that Williams sets in the
poem, and because the visual is one of the senses and this is a sensual
poem, “plum” is a great choice for “This Is Just To Say.”
If I look up “plum” as an adjective, which I'm encouraged to do
by the fact that the plums must be “plum” colored, I will find more
information that backs up my sense that Williams has chosen an espe-
cially sensual type of fruit. “Plum” also means “plump” (“plum, adj.1”
1), and the examples (I get ahead of myself!) suggest that this definition
usually applied to desirable female flesh. This definition emphasizes
the sensual and intimate atmosphere of the poem. The next definition
of the adjective is “soft, yielding” (“plum, adj.1” 2a); the examples sug-
gest that it was usually applied in this sense to rocks and cakes, but
I can still argue that the word “plum,” because the flesh of the fruit
is plump, soft, and yielding, carries the association of physical desire
and pleasure as well. The adjectival form of “plum” therefore enhances
the sensual dimension of the poem and suggests that the relationship
between the people represented in the poem has an erotic quality. As
I had a vague sense that the poem had an erotic dimension, I'm glad
to see that my work in the dictionary is reinforcing that perception.
MORE ON PLUMS
If you look up “plum” as an adjective in the OED you'll see that
the first definition (plump) is identified as “obsolete” and the
second (soft) is labeled “regional.” It’s important to recognize
that these meanings were not the most common or likely for
English-speaking people at the time the poem was written. But
poets know language like painters know paint and electricians
know electricity, and we should expect poets to draw on the his-
tory of language—even as they contribute to its future.
41
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
You can look up other key words that we identified to see if
their definitions enrich your understanding of why the poet chose
them and how they work to help create a powerful experience for
the reader. “Sweet” and “cold” both have sensual and emotional
dimensions, for instance. “Breakfast” comes from “breaking” and
“fast,” or eating after a time of not eating, and the word can have a
ritual or ceremonial meaning. This may suggest that the speaker is
aware of having disturbed the customary practices of his world and
within his relationship with the person who is hearing or reading
the “note” about the plums. The request for forgiveness is not just
for having eaten the plums, we can conclude, but also for breaking
the customary habits and forms of communion within the world of
the poem. The speaker is not as serious as I am making him out to
be—in asking for forgiveness, a legal and even theological term, for
something so petty as eating the plums, he’s exaggerating the trans-
gression. But, at the same time, he may be elevating the everyday
habits of his relationship, giving them a spiritual or transcendent
gloss. This enhancement of the familiar would be in synch with how
he raises an everyday form of communication to the status of poetry,
so I'm thinking that I might be onto something here. I'll put it in
my evidence file, along with the other observations that I've noticed.
A NOTE ON NOTES
When you take notes from the Oxford English Dictionary,
make sure you write down the heading for the entry you are
quoting from or paraphrasing (for example, “plum, adj.1”) and
the number of the definition within the entry (for example, 2a).
Examples of Usage
The OED offers a third type of information: examples for each
definition of the use of the word through the ages. This feature
is especially helpful when you are working on literature from the
more distant past: for instance, if you are writing an essay about
Hamlet, you will find definitions and examples that were current in
Shakespeare’s time, which can really help you understand exactly
42
USING REFERENCE WORKS
how the play works and what passages mean. These usage exam-
ples may also help you to identify symbols (that is, words that have
abstract meanings beyond the concrete things they refer to) and
allusions (references to the works of other literary writers). The
examples of usage in the OED can be a quick shortcut to a deep
insight about the literary work you are studying.
“Sweet” is an old and rich word with many meanings that are
relevant to our analysis of “This Is Just To Say.” “Sweet” can refer
to flavor, to scent, or to sound; to foods or flowers; and to emo-
tions and actions. Again, with this choice, Williams is emphasizing
the sensual and erotic dimensions of the relationship depicted in
the poem, within which the plums have taken on such power and
beauty. But there is more information that might be relevant here in
the examples of usage. Let’s look more closely at them and at what
they can tell us about “This Is Just To Say.”
Under “sweet, a. and adv.” in the OED, the first meaning is as
follows:
9
1. a. Pleasing to the sense of taste; having a pleasant taste or
flavour ... having the characteristic flavour (ordinarily pleas-
ant when not in excess) of sugar, honey, and many ripe fruits,
which corresponds to one of the primary sensations of taste.
Also said of the taste or flavour. Often opposed to bitter or
sour...
Nothing much surprises me about this definition, which is what
I thought “sweet” meant in the context of the poem. But when I
skim through the examples of the usage, I notice one that really
interests me.
It’s a quotation from John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.
(The reference is abbreviated in some versions of the OED as “Milton
P.L.” However, if I click on the name “Milton,” I get to a list of his
titles, Paradise Lost among them.) The quotation is this: “O Fruit
Divine, Sweet of thy self, but much more sweet thus cropt,” and it
comes from Book V of the poem (which has 12 books), beginning
with line 68. There's an online version of Paradise Lost maintained
at a site called The Milton Reading Room, and 1 look up the quota-
tion there. That way I can insert the line breaks, which are missing
43
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
from the OED quotation, and I can also use the search function on
my browser to look for the word “sweet” in the rest of Book V of
the poem. Because I teach Paradise Lost and do research on Milton’s
works, I'm quite familiar with the poem, and I know something
about the context for the quotation: Eve is recounting to Adam the
dream that she has had that Satan put in her head. In the dream, an
angelic form eats the fruit from the tree that has been forbidden to
Adam and Eve (the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) and claims
that it has given him the knowledge of the gods. In the dream, Eve
also intends to eat the fruit, but she wakes before she does.
Because I know about the context and have studied the poem
so closely, I have a bit of an unfair advantage here. I know the fruit
is forbidden, that the angelic form is Satan in disguise, that the fruit
is eaten, that this transgression constitutes original sin, and that
the whole drama is played out with the focus on the relationship
between Adam and Eve. But even if you don’t know this, you may
well be familiar with the story of the forbidden fruit and original
sin. Or you may ask your instructor if they think there is any rela-
tionship between the fruit in the passage from Paradise Lost and
the fruit in “This Is Just To Say”; they are likely to answer that it is
certainly possible that Williams wants us to remember the associa-
tion between forbidden fruit, transgression, and punishment. You
can decide if that association is ironic, in that he’s foisting a mytho-
logical and moralistic story onto a simple and everyday situation,
thus implying a connection between the most solemn of discourses
and the note on the kitchen table, but that’s all to the good: your
analysis will be richer for such thinking.
You might decide, on reflection and after this research, that the
plums in “This Is Just To Say” are a symbol. Symbols in literature are
words that represent things but also have meaning beyond the things
themselves. For instance, worms connote death, flowing water can
mean time, and germinating seeds often signal life and growth.
Symbols start because the thing is associated with an abstract or
complex phenomenon, but they gain their power and importance
through repeated use within literature. In literature, we can usually
tell if a worm means death or is just a worm by the context.
One of the interesting things to note about “This Is Just To
Say” is that it doesn’t feature flowing water or growing plants: it
44
USING REFERENCE WORKS
doesn’t rely on images to convey its meanings in the way that some
other poems do. A lot of poems play with traditional images and
undermine their conventional meanings. Think of Shakespeare’s
sonnet that begins “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’
(“Sonnet 130”), for example; it challenges the way in which poets
lazily use tired images of natural splendor to describe their lovers’
beauty. But the connection that the dictionary has revealed to us
between the poem by Williams and the Judeo-Christian myth of
original sin may signal that the plums in “This Is Just To Say” are
symbols of something beyond the material fruit, purple and sweet
and cold as they are. As I've said, Williams may be using the image
ironically—he may even be making fun of how poets use images
to refer to concepts and expect their readers to know what they're
talking about. But still the line of thought is interesting. Perhaps we
juxtapose everyday thinking and action against moralistic thinking
and mythological action when we are aware of the potential for the
plums to be a symbol—and perhaps that set of thoughts is one of
the things we take away from reading the poem.
Your notes from the dictionary can be filed separately from
your notes from the close reading such as we undertook in Chapter
Two. But tag them with terms that will allow you to line them up
with the parts of the poem to which they pertain. Imagine you are
building a database, even a spreadsheet, which will integrate evi-
dence from the work you are studying with evidence from reference
sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Remember that your
plan is to assemble enough evidence that writing your essay will
simply be a matter of explaining and accounting for the evidence
in relation to your overall argument. So document carefully and
thoroughly, and label your files and tag your notes clearly.
3
SCHOLARLY EDITIONS
One of the most important contributions that scholars make to our
understanding of literature and the worlds in which it is created
and consumed is the preparation of scholarly editions. To use an
example, Shakespeare’s plays were published without his oversight
and often from copies that had been used on the stage or that were
made on the basis of actors’ reports to printers. There are great lines
45
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
in Shakespeare’s plays that we will never know the origin of, for sure.
An example is Juliet’s “rose” speech in Romeo and Julies: the version
we are confident that Shakespeare had a direct hand in delivering
to the printer reads “a rose by any other word would smell as sweet,”
while the version that we love and admire as Shakespeare’s was
probably recited (imperfectly) by an actor who had performed the
play and reads “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Since the speech, as you know, is about names and the burdens they
impose and not, more generally, about words and the ways in which
they function, we like the second better. But a scholarly editor has
to decide on which to put in the text that you read, and that deci-
sion has to be backed up by logic and research. This work can take
years of patient investigating. Some of your instructors have devoted
careers to scholarly editing.
In addition to printing more of the author’s works than you might
already have read, scholarly editions have three features that are of
importance to you as a student of literature. The first is what I've
already described: the scholarly editor makes decisions about what
version of the work to print. Poems can be printed in magazines and
early collections and then revised for inclusion in anthologies and col-
lected works. Plays can change between page and stage. Novels can
be serialized in magazines or revised for republication. Significant
>
changes can occur in revisions, and those changes can affect how we
interpret the works. Scholarly editors research these changes, figur-
ing out which to include in their editions and then how to signal to
readers that the changes occurred at some point in history.
WHY THAT BOOK IN PARTICULAR?
It may frustrate you that your instructor wants you to have a
certain edition of a work for class. That edition may be more
expensive or harder to get than other editions. But the instruc-
tor has good reasons: they want you to have a version of the
text that has been prepared by a scholar, that has annotations,
and that has an introduction. These are all valuable resources
for the study of the literature you are reading in the course you
are taking.
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USING REFERENCE WORKS
The second feature of scholarly editions is that they normally
have annotations—footnotes or endnotes and sometimes marginal
notes as well—that give the reader additional information about
the text. In works that were written long ago, such as Shakespeare’s
plays, these notes often include definitions of archaic words. They
may also identify allusions to other works or to mythological stories.
In collections of poetry, they may give additional information about
the first publications of the poem or the biographical or cultural
context for the poem.
The third feature of a scholarly edition is the “Introduction.”
In order to prepare the edition, the scholar has had to read all of
the author’s works and many more from the same period; find out
everything they can about the author’s biography; survey the critical
reception of the works since their first publication or circulation;
and come to conclusions about how to interpret the work. The schol-
arly editor is the pre-eminent expert on the works of the author they
have edited, and this knowledge is distilled in the introduction to
the work you are studying. The introduction is the best place to
start if you want to enlarge your understanding of the work and
learn more about its genesis, its place in literary history, and the
possibilities for interpretation that have been pursued by scholars
over the years.
Scholarly editions are usually printed, but they are becoming
increasingly available through library databases. If you are study-
ing a work in an individual text recommended or required by your
instructor, then you will usually have a scholarly edition; more are
available in the library and will perhaps be listed in the edition that you
have, as additional resources or references. If you are studying a work
printed in an anthology, there should be information about the source
of the work that the editors of the anthology used in the anthology.
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-1939 has a
lot of information that is valuable for our study of “This Is Just To
Say.” Even before the title page, there’s a list of works by Williams,
and I'm astonished and impressed at the number of individual vol-
umes of poetry he published. He was a prolific and accomplished
writer. There’s a photo of him opposite the title page that shows me
he was a white guy who could wear a suit and tie and easily bear
an intelligent and thoughtful expression. The “Contents” list is ten
47
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
pages long; there must be hundreds of poems in this book. The
book is organized according to the volumes of poetry he published,
although “This Is Just To Say” is in the section of poems that were
published individually and did not appear in a collection. There
is a “Preface” that describes the editorial process for the book
and gives a little information about how Williams participated
in the collection of his poems, but there is no “Introduction” that
describes the life and literary career of the author; I'm quite dis-
appointed about that, and I will have to find out more elsewhere.
But there are annotations, and the note to “This Is Just To Say” is
a gold mine of just the sort of information that is available only in
a scholarly edition.
BEWARE!
To be completely honest with you, when I first thought of
using “This Is Just To Say” for this section of Writing Essays
About Literature, I looked up the poem on the Internet and
was sent to the digitized book library put online by a major
search-engine company, where I found the poem. What really
astonished me was that, when I went to look it up again a
few days later, the digitized version of the 1986 edition of The
Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-1939
had disappeared. The second edition of the work, published in
1991, was only partly represented online, as only a few pages
had been scanned. The lesson I've learned the hard way is this:
at this point in time, non-scholarly digital libraries can some-
times be unreliable, and print resources and databases found
through your university library are preferable.
The note to “This Is Just To Say” tells me that Williams wrote
a poem called “Reply” that was not published until 1982. In the
Collected Poems, the editors print the version from Williams’s
typescript. It begins like this: “Dear Bill: I've made a / couple of
sandwiches for you. / In the ice-box you'll find / blue-berries ...”
(536). The subtitle of the poem is “crumpled on her desk,” and the
48
USING REFERENCE WORKS
poem implies that this is the response by the speaker’s wife to “This
Is Just To Say.” The poetic “Reply” ends “Love. Floss.” and then
“Please switch off the telephone.” As a companion piece to “This Is
Just To Say,” “Reply” is rich—and quite hilarious. The sensuousness
of “This Is Just To Say” is completely absent from “Reply”: there are
few adjectives, no “sweet” or “delicious,” and “cold” is used to refer
to “a glass of cold coffee” —one of the items in the icebox. There
is also no moral dimension (no “forgive”). There are lots of defin-
ite articles—the world depicted is completely, almost relentlessly,
material. The intersubjective relationship that is depicted is more
prosaic than in the first poem: the speaker patiently explains how to
make tea, as if the reader or listener is quite naive or even somewhat
underdeveloped intellectually. Read together with “This Is Just To
Say,” the second poem highlights the complexities and richness of
the first poem. We might even say it comments ironically on the
relationship between real-world communication (the note on the
kitchen table) and poetry, a relationship that the first poem presents
us with: whatever “This Is Just To Say” seems to think about the
potential for poetry in everyday communications, “Reply” makes
sure we remember that everyday writing is often lacking in feeling,
sensuality, and intellectual interest.
Scholarly editions are treasure troves for students of literature.
In addition to the fact that they may offer additional works by the
same author (usually the case with scholarly editions of poetry), they
compact years of research into manageable forms. They are always
produced by people with exceptional expertise, and they are valued
by libraries and scholars in the field. Whenever you have the chance,
examine what we call the apparatus of the text: look at the table
of contents, the statement of editorial principles, and the annota-
tions, and read the “Introduction.” Even if you don’t use any of the
information you gather directly in your essay, this reading will help
you to better understand how literature happens historically, what
literary scholars do, and how they present literature and literary
scholarship to the reading public. As usual, take careful notes and
label them with categories that relate to what you've already gath-
ered as evidence from the poem. Also note any ideas you've had as
you've been collecting evidence.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
ENCYCLOPEDIAS
An encyclopedia is a work that collects knowledge at a general level
on an exhaustive list of topics. Encyclopedias can be devoted to
a single area of knowledge, so you will find encyclopedias about
Japan, geology, or Judaism in your library, if it’s anything like mine.
There are specialist encyclopedias that relate to literary studies too,
and you might find these useful for your research. In my library, The
Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, the Literary Encyclopedia,
and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English
are all listed under “Encyclopedias” in the online reference section
of the library’s website. Each of these will have something to offer
about Williams and the literary history to which he belongs.
Such encyclopedias are very useful to the study of literature.
The first thing that you might look up in an encyclopedia is the
author’s biography, which will contain information about their
life and their career as a writer. Encyclopedias often also contain
overviews of time periods, literary movements (such as transcen-
dentalism or symbolism), literary forms (such as the elegy or the
novel), and literary devices (such as alliteration or allusion) and
terms (such as irony or melodrama).
Encyclopedias have been easily adapted to digital publica-
tion. These searchable and easily cross-referenced digital texts are
even more useful and rich than print encyclopedias. Besides, the
ease of updating digital texts means that the knowledge in digital
encyclopedias is usually current; the wide availability and easy
access to digital resources make online encyclopedias popular, and
that popularity can drive quality higher. In fact, as I'm sure you
know, the most popular encyclopedia used today is the digitally
born Wikipedia. I believe I can say that if you are literate and have
access to a computer, you have used Wikipedia. I doubt I could say
that about any other site, except popular search engines.
Wikipedia has been the subject of some controversy in recent
years, and there has been reluctance within academic institutions
to accept its use as a source for student essays. Because Wikipedia
has responded positively to criticisms—by making it harder for
individuals to change articles without editorial intervention, for
example, and by labeling questionable articles clearly—the quality
50
USING REFERENCE WORKS
has improved, and most instructors now allow students to use it
(and use it often themselves for quick facts and explanations!). I
allow students to use it, and, in fact, I prefer them to use Wikipedia
rather than other question-answering services on the web, which
do not have as stringent quality controls as Wikipedia does (and
often just copy what Wikipedia contains, sometimes inaccurately
and often partially). You can read more about Wikipedia in various
places; the article in the Wikipedia about the Wikipedia is actually
very helpful, quite balanced, and contains a number of links and
references to other accounts. You should check with your instructor
as to whether you are allowed to use Wikipedia in your essays. Other
general and specialized encyclopedias are available through your
library’s portal, and you can turn to them for information. Here
I'm going to refer to the Wikipedia article about William Carlos
Williams as my example.
You'll remember that the scholarly edition of Williams's poems,
our source for “This Is Just To Say,” does not have much in the
way of a biography of the poet. The Wikipedia article, on the other
hand, has lots of biographical and literary historical information
about him. He was born in New Jersey, and he was a doctor. He was
acquainted with other great poets of his era, such as Ezra Pound,
Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.), Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens,
Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, and with artists
such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. There’s a lot of information
in the article about his ideas of poetry and technique, and a little
information about his politics and personal life. The article doesn’t
say if he was well regarded during his lifetime, although it looks as
if other poets took him very seriously, but it does say that he was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize and other major honors after his death.
When you take notes from an Internet source, you should make
sure to write down the date on which you took the note. The rea-
son for this is that Internet sources, unlike books and journals, can
be altered between the time that you use them and the time that
your quotation is read by your instructor or peer. Also make sure
to copy the URL exactly, even if the citation style you are using
doesn’t require it. Last, I'd like to emphasize that while Internet
resources are terrific, your instructors will prefer ones that are
available through the library and others that they approve. General
51
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
resources on the web contain many errors, are unstable, and are
often subjective in a way that is interesting for us as readers but not
useful to us as scholars and critics. If you would like to look at other
reference works that are relevant to English studies, look at the list
of electronic handbooks, encyclopedias, and dictionaries that your
librarian has identified as relevant to English studies. Most col-
lege and university libraries produce extensive research guides for
every academic discipline taught at the school, and these describe
the reference works for that subject and how to use them. Or talk
to a librarian yourself. Librarians know an awful lot that can help
you in your work.
CYBER-VANDALISM?
If you click on the “history” tab of a Wikipedia page, you can
see the history of additions and revisions to the article that
you are reading. The Wikipedia community is quite rigorous
in its efforts to catch and reverse malicious or erroneous addi-
tions to articles, and you can see those actions recorded in
the log. Click on “talk” next to any username, and you will
find out more. In fact, in preparing the second edition of this
book, I found that the entry on Williams had been signifi-
cantly revised! That’s why we should always include the date
we accessed digital resources.
CONCLUSION
My research in these reference works has led me to several insights
that I will write down in my list of great ideas that I have had.
1. From the dictionary, I learned (or was reminded) that
a plum is a fruit and a color. Perhaps I can say that
Williams's choice of words emphasizes the many sensual
dimensions of the fruit: the color, the appearance, the feel
(“cold”), and the taste. (The only sense missing is hearing.
guess you can’t hear plums.)
52
USING REFERENCE WORKS
2. From the dictionary, I learned that most of the words that
are used in the poem derive from Old English and are older
and simpler words compared to others in modern English.
3. From the scholarly edition, I confirmed that the poem is
in a style written as if it were a note to his wife (he wrote a
“Reply” to it in her voice) and that it was written in 1934.
4. From the biographical article, I learned that Williams was
a doctor, a father, and that he and Florence (Floss) were
married for decades.
I'll add these notes to the ones I collected after my close reading. I
have a sense that my insights are growing and that I'm going to be
able to write a good essay.
You might be ready to write your essay now. Certainly, if I didn’t
want to go further, or didn’t have to, I could stop here and write up a
nice essay; it would have something to do with how the use of words
in the poem reinforces the themes I perceive (of sensual experience,
of communication between two people, and of intimate life). You
might want to see my attempt at doing this in Sample Essay One
(pp. 169-76). If you are not supposed to go beyond reference works in
your research, you can skip to Chapter Six, in which we will discuss
how to put together the essay from the evidence you have collected.
If you want to do research in social and historical contexts, however,
you should go on to the next chapter.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How do you know if a reference work is a suitable source
for an essay?
2. What are the three main things that we can learn about
words from the OED?
3. What are the features of a scholarly edition?
4. What is the potential value of reading other works by the
author you are writing your essay about?
5. What do you and your classmates think about using
Wikipedia? What does your instructor think?
6. How do you think the biography of authors might be useful
in the study of literature?
53
CHAPTER FOUR
Research about
Social and
Historical Contexts
LITERATURE IS PRODUCED IN SOCIETIES AND WITHIN
history. In many ways, literature is a group effort: it uses language,
which is the common property of everyone in the society, and it
requires not just writers but readers. Literature reflects the values,
beliefs, and perceptions of the world in which it was produced, and
it can also contribute to shaping or altering those. Readers, as much
as writers, make literature what it is: they interpret it, share it, talk
about it, critique it, and imitate it. The language from literature
enters into other discourses: think, for example, of terms such as
“Big Brother” or phrases such as “To be or not to be,” which have
become commonplaces in our communication, even for people who
have never actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four or seen a performance
of Hamlet.
Literary critics often work to place literature in social contexts.
But social contexts are very broad. How do you know what aspects
to pursue? How do you find good-quality, relevant information?
And how do you incorporate the information you find into your
35
SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
analysis of the literature you are studying? This chapter will explore
these questions.
In this chapter, we’ll again use the example of William Carlos
Williams's poem “This Is Just To Say.” You can reread it now; you'll
find it at the beginning of Chapter Two (p. 19).
TOPICS FOR RESEARCH: SOCIAL
PHENOMENA AND LITERARY MOVEMENTS
Understanding literature in its social and historical context is an
infinitely productive mode of interpretation, and one that most
academic literary critics practice in some form or another. But aca-
demic literary critics may take years (and get paid!) to troll through
archives, read thousands of documents, and arrange and rearrange
their evidence in order to produce critical works that situate litera-
ture in its time period and social context in a way that illuminates
the literature. How can you interpret literature in terms of its his-
torical and social contexts, given that you have lots of other courses,
limited time in which to work on the project, and many interests
and obligations?
The key is to stick close to the works you are studying and the
author or authors of those works. Allowing yourself to be guided by
the work (and other works by the author, if they are a manageable
length for you to read) will help narrow the field of choices you have
and ensure that your research is relevant to the works you are study-
ing. Even so, works will give you a wide range of areas to investigate.
Literary works are always about topics we know have a social his-
tory: marriage, for example, or exploration, or space travel, or class
relations, or theories of the mind. Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, and
Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy are all set in wartime, and research
about that topic will help you to understand how characters behave,
their priorities and pressures, and how conflicts are resolved and
pleasures are portrayed. King Lear and The Stone Angel are about
aging, and aging itself has a history: in different times and differ-
ent social situations we perceive the elderly differently, and they in
turn perceive themselves in relation to social attitudes toward that
group. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Color Purple, and Things Fall Apart are
56
RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
all about race as both a way of organizing a society and a personal
characteristic that affects how people perceive themselves and act
within a society.
Beyond the works themselves, the author’s biography will give
you clues as to profitable areas of investigation. Author biograph-
ies are found in encyclopedias and reference works, in biographies
published as books, and, often, in introductions to scholarly editions
of an author’s works. From information about the authors in biog-
raphies, you can select topics to research further. Nadine Gordimer,
winner of the Booker Prize in 1974 for her novel The Conservationist,
was a member of the African National Congress for decades; there’s
lots of information about the ANC, about apartheid, and about resist-
ance to apartheid in South Africa that’s readily available to you in
reference works. Henry James, whose novels Daisy Miller and The
Portrait of a Lady are intensely focused on the consciousness of their
sensitively drawn female protagonists, had a brother William James,
who was a psychologist. Is it any wonder that Henry’s understanding
of character was influenced by contemporary theories of the mind?
Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse-Five (and many other works
that blend satire and science fiction), was a soldier and a prisoner
of war in World War 11, and his experiences contributed to his rep-
resentation of war and the suffering of those who were involved with
it. Using biographies and reference works, you can pinpoint a few of
the issues associated with an author’s historical context that interest
you and that you feel have a presence in their work.
Authors are also often involved in literary movements and
communities. Literary movements are founded on aesthetic prin-
ciples, and members of those communities will often articulate the
values they share and try to promote in their works. These can be
content-based values—for instance, Romantic poets were com-
mitted to representing the lives of real working people. Or they
can be technical and aesthetic values: Romantic poets were also
committed to using the language that people spoke rather than
the elevated and removed “poetic” language conventional to the
works of their predecessors. Most authors belong, either actively
and consciously or passively and without explicit engagement, to
aesthetic movements and groupings. T.S. Eliot was associated with
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and James Joyce, each of whom influ-
enced Eliot’s work. bpNichol, the Canadian poet, was connected
with Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and the Black Mountain poets,
and comparing his work with the values they articulate in their
statements about “projective verse” (a form of poetry that was to be
based on how people speak and breathe, not on traditional concepts
of meter and rhythm) would be a productive exercise. Zora Neale
Hurston was part of what is now called the Harlem Renaissance (it
was called the New Negro Movement at the time), which sought
to represent the lives and circumstances of African Americans in
forms and language that were closer to their experience and less
determined by the attitudes and presumptions of white people and
their literature. Again, you can use biographies to identify aesthetic
movements and artistic communities with which the author you are
studying was associated, and then you can investigate these further
in reference works and books from the library.
THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY
In 1946, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published the
first version of their essay called “The Intentional Fallacy.’
In this essay, they argue that “the design or intention of the
author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for
judging the success of a work of literary art” (3) and that
speculation about the author belongs to literary biography—
not literary criticism. Like other New Critics, Wimsatt and
Beardsley believe that critics should examine the work itself
exclusively. Close reading is always valuable and often suffi-
cient. But critics nowadays like to look to context to see if it
helps to explain the choices the writer has made and the effect
the work of literature has on its readers. Still, Wimsatt and
Beardsley are right in one way: never assume that the voice of
a literary work is identical with that of its author. Authors are
craftspeople; poems and novels are things they make—they are
not simply shout-outs.
3
58
RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
USEFUL RESOURCES
However small your library, it will offer you a range of useful resour-
ces for research in social and historical contexts relevant to English
studies. Some of these resources are in print, but many are in digital
form. Many of the digital resources that your library offers are not
available for all users of the Internet: they are subscriptions, and the
library pays for you to have access to them. So take some time to famil-
iarize yourself with the digital resources provided by your library.
Digital resources have changed the practice of research for
all levels of students of literature. Facsimiles (exact copies, usually
photographic) and transcriptions (copies that duplicate the words
but not the material features of the texts in question) of works that
used to be available only to the most privileged and dedicated schol-
ars can now be used by anyone with access to particular databases.
Works that existed in single copies (letters, manuscripts, rare printed
documents) and that may have been seen or read previously by only a
handful of people are now widely distributed in facsimile. Bodies of
work and collections of texts can be searched, organized, and com-
pared in ways that were not possible before the age of the computer.
DATABASES AT MY LIBRARY
My library at the University of Waterloo subscribes to a
number of digital resources that can help with the study of
the social and historical contexts of literature. They include
Eighteenth Century Journals, a digital facsimile of serial
publications issued between 1685 and 1815; North American
Women’s Letters and Diaries, which includes transcriptions
of letters and diaries by women of North America, searchable
by many different criteria, including date range and location;
and Defining Gender, a collection of digital facsimiles, sup-
plemented by topical essays, which illuminate all aspects of the
social construction and experience of gender in the English-
speaking world between 1450 and 1910. Check out resources
such as these through your library's interface.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Most of these resources have definitions that limit them to
places, languages, time periods, and topics. The titles of the resour-
ces give a brief indication of their contents. But the richness of
these databases must be explored to be believed. Early English Books
Online has more than 100,000 photographic facsimiles of books and
pamphlets printed before 1700. North American Immigrant Letters,
Diaries, and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors, approximately
100,000 pages of information, and a collection of audio files that
pertain to the experience of immigration to America between 1800
and 1950. Each of these databases offers a unique perspective on its
subject area, and having a look through both will help you with your
work and open your eyes to the tremendous riches that are available
to scholars and students of all types.
USING YOUR FINDINGS
As we found out from his biography, William Carlos Williams was
associated with a large number of other poets, novelists, and visual
artists during his long career and with several literary movements,
including modernism, beat poetry, and the Black Mountain school.
Most famously, he was part of the movement called “imagism,”
which—like so many poetic movements before it—sought to use lan-
guage that was common to social discourse and aimed to represent
reality and the experience of it in ways that were more direct and sen-
sual and less moralistic and ideological than had been the case in the
poetry of the previous generation. There are articles on imagism in
reference works. You can consult, for example, The Oxford Companion
to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, which is available online; an
article on Wikipedia that is quite helpful; and various mentions in
several articles in the online Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
and Criticism. Williams's famous dictum was “no ideas but in things,”
which is from the opening section of his long poem Paterson (6). He
elaborated on this idea in some of his essays, which are widely avail-
able in collected versions in libraries. One way to approach “This Is
Just To Say” is to read it in terms of the aesthetic and social values
that Williams tried to assert through his poetry. You might want to
consider, in addition, a couple of his other poems, notably “The Red
Wheelbarrow,” which also expresses these values. If you were to go
60
RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
further afield, you might want to read some poetry and poetics (that is,
prose that articulates a theory of poetry) by other authors with whom
he was contemporary or associated; they will be listed in biographies
and articles in reference works about Williams and about the literary
movements to which he belonged.
There are other interesting leads in Williams's biography that
might be worth following up. He lived through both world wars. He
was born and lived for much of his life in New Jersey. He went to
medical school and practiced as a family doctor for many years. He
and his wife Florence (Flossie) had two sons. There are photographs
in biographies and on the Internet that can give you a flavor of the
period, a sense of Williams himself, and an impression about his
context and surroundings.
As you search for the topic you will pursue, it’s important to
read more than you can possibly use. You must explore what is there
in order to find that combination of what interests you and what
connects with the literature that is at the center of your studies.
When I write an essay, I usually look at about ten times as many
books and articles as I actually quote in the essay, and I usually
read about four times as many. That sounds inefficient, doesn’t
it? But really, I'm learning a lot as I go. There are three kinds of
learning going on: one, I'm learning more about the time period or
literary context in general; two, I'm learning what I don’t want to
write about, which is helpful in determining what I do want to write
about; three, I'm learning what other people have said about what
does interest me, and I may decide there is something missing from
what they've said or that I want to say something different. You
aren't expected to do as much skimming and reading as I do; this
is my job, after all. But you should expect to look at three times as
many works as you ultimately use and to read at least twice as much.
The learning is good, in a general sense: that’s what you're in school
for. But you also hold on to your notes, and they may well come in
handy for another assignment in another course.
There are many contexts for the poem that do interest me, but
in order to make a decision, I have to go back to the poem, and to
my notes on the poem, and go from there. When I return to “This
Is Just To Say,” I'm not struck by anything that will connect with
war or medicine or New Jersey. What I am struck by—again—is the
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
domestic nature of the setting (the “icebox,” the note-like quality of
the poem) and the intimacy of the communication. So I decide I'd
like to investigate domestic and family life in the era of the poem.
In my library’s search interface, I type in “family AND America” as
subjects, to get me started.
BOOLEAN OPERATORS
The “AND” in the middle of “family AND America” is called a
Boolean operator, and it establishes that I want to retrieve only
entries that have both those terms in their subject descriptions.
Inserting “or” instead would produce a list of items that have
one or the other term in their subject descriptions. In advanced
searches, you can construct longer Boolean strings, so that
you can ask for “family AND America NOT ‘upper class’; this
search would filter out all the items also tagged with the phrase
“upper class.” These tags are called “metadata” —meaning
the data that is above the data of the text. The structure of
metadata is one of the areas of scholarship and professional
practice that will grow exponentially in the next few years; it’s
a good idea to figure out what it is!
Diagram 1: Boolean Operators at Work
family America
family AND America family or America
‘upper class’
family ; America
family AND America NOT ‘upper class’
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RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
I start with a book that has a title that fits my search criteria (in
this case, Family Life in 20th- Century America), and then I look at the
subject categories listed in its catalogue entry. From there, I go to
the list of all the books that share that combination of subject cat-
egories (“Families - United States - History — 20th century”). There,
I find another book that I request from my library system, The
“American Way”: Family and Community in the Shaping of American
Identity by Allan Carlson. I also see a book called Images of Family
Life in Magazine Advertising, 19920-1978. When I call up its catalogue
entry, I look at the subject categories that it is tagged with and click
on one of them that interests me (“Sex role in advertising - United
States — History - 20th century”). I choose this subject heading
because I'm interested not just in what people did but in how their
lives were reflected back to them, idealized, or even criticized in
media, and advertising is a great place to start. Looking under that
subject category, I find another book that seems relevant to me; it’s
by Simone Weil Davis, and it’s called Living Up to the Ads: Gender
Fictions of the 1920s. Although this book ended up being not directly
useful to me, I learned from it anyway, and it could come in handy
for another project.
From these works, I learn a lot about family and domestic life
and how it was perceived in twentieth-century America. It’s fascin-
ating stuff, things I had no idea about! For instance, did you know
that “[iln 1900, the typical woman spent 44 hours a week preparing
meals and cleaning up after them” and that laundry took all day to
do by hand. “By 1975, household food preparation and cleanup had
dropped to 10 hours per week, and, by the end of the century, some
women spent no time at all on food preparation” and laundry was
done by machines (Coleman et al. 52). Refrigeration changed how
families were fed because food, including pre-prepared foods such
as frozen dinners, could be stored for longer periods of time. The
refrigerator changed the work of housewives: they cooked less and
shopped more (Coleman et al. 56). By 1934, in a middle- or upper-
middle-class home, there would have been several labor-saving
devices, such as a vacuum cleaner, an automatic sewing machine,
and an electric rather than solid-fuel stove, and many ready-made
products would have been available. All these were helpful to home-
makers, but they also led to changes in their lives: with less to do,
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they had less need for hired help and less cause to do things together
(such as bread making or rug beating). So social life changed with
changes in technology.
In 1929, the Great Depression started, and, at its worst, one-
third of the workforce was unemployed. The consequences to family
life were devastating; people without jobs were poor, unhealthy, and
unhappy. They forestalled marriage and having children, and they
moved to places that they thought might offer better luck in the job
market. Men left their families to try to find work, and women went
into factory jobs that kept them at work for long hours in some-
times dangerous conditions: “the deep economic downturn was also
a crisis of the family” (A. Carlson 65). The government stepped in,
and its policies emphasized a certain form of the family that hadnt
always been the norm (A. Carlson 65). In order to ensure that fam-
ilies had a living wage, and on the presumptions that men made
more money for their work than did women and that families (hus-
bands and children) were better cared for by wives and mothers who
were full-time homemakers, support programs and the advertising
that went with them emphasized the kind of family we now think
of as traditional: a husband or father who works outside the home
and a wife or mother who works within the home, raising children,
preparing food, and keeping everything clean (A. Carlson 64).
So the people at the center of Williams’s poem were living in
a society that was under stress. The form of the family, the roles of
husband and wife, and marital and community relationships were
all experiencing change, were all under pressure for broader social
and economic reasons. With changes in the home (such as vacuum
cleaners and washing machines) that increased the solitude of indi-
viduals and couples, especially in an upper-middle-class setting
such as that enjoyed by the Williams family, husbands and wives
were discovering and experimenting with new ways of communicat-
ing and with new forms of intimacy and companionship. In Images
of Family Life in Magazine Advertising, 1920-1978, Bruce W. Brown
says there was a steady rise in the depiction of intimacy between
family members in the medium and period he studied (75) and that
there was just as steady a decrease in the depiction of wives doing
housework with newly available appliances and equipment (31).
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RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
What does all this have to do with “This Is Just To Say”? The
speaker and the listener in the poem have an “icebox” rather than a
refrigerator, which was normal for the period although refrigerators
were available. But it means that, in the domestic scene referred to
in the poem, the woman probably spent a lot of time handling food,
buying it, storing it, preparing it, and cleaning up after meals. In
this world, a woman’s relationship with food was part of her identity,
part of her role in the household and in the marriage. The speaker’s
transgression, for which he asks forgiveness, has involved a foray
into her territory, into the “icebox,” and the plundering of her stores,
the “plums.” But the speaker does not seem to expect to be pun-
ished really. Although he acknowledges her territorial privileges
over the plums, he emphasizes two other things in their relation-
ship: the enjoyment of sensual experience (“delicious,” “so sweet,”
“so cold”) and the act of communicating about that experience, about
each other’s feelings, about each other’s work in the household. The
speaker has gently mocked the kind of relationship in which the
woman controls the food and the man is there to eat it; he has refig-
ured their marriage as a relationship of intimates, within which they
communicate feelings, pleasures, and affection. (Floss’s response
in “Reply”—which was crafted by Williams and not his wife, we
must remember—seems to reject the initiative, doesn’t it [Williams,
Collected Poems 536]?)
Read in relation to the historical backdrop, in which the
material conditions and social understanding of marriage and
family life were changing rapidly, the poem appears to chal-
lenge older ideas about marriage and to embrace new ideas that
emphasize shared intimacy, communication, and affectionate com-
panionship. At the same time, the poem makes what we can read
as a social phenomenon intensely personal. Perhaps we can come
to a conclusion about the relationship between the social and the
personal—that feelings are always intensely personal, even when
they are supported by a social context that validates and encour-
ages them. And perhaps we get a glimmer of another idea—that
lyric poetry is one of the best ways we have of knowing about this
connection between the personal and the social, as this poetry is
always written in context but always from a personal point of view.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
CONCLUSION
My research in social and historical contexts for “This Is Just To
Say” has given me a few more ideas to add to my list.
1. For a woman in 1934, domestic life was labor-intensive,
although less so than it had been (Coleman et al. 52).
2. The wife was more isolated in the home than she
had been in previous eras, when extended family and
employees might have shared the house (Coleman et al.
56).
3. Food was an important part of women’s lives (Coleman
et al. 52). The refrigerator changed the pattern of
housewives’ lives: they cooked less and shopped more
(Coleman et al. 56).
4. Inthe period when the poem was written, there was
ideological support for the nuclear family (A. Carlson 64),
which led to pressure on marriage to be a more intimate
and personally rewarding relationship than it had been
before (Brown 75, 31).
These pieces of information make me think that, read in relation
to the historical backdrop, the poem seems to challenge older ideas
about marriage and to embrace new ideas that emphasize shared
intimacy, communication, and affectionate companionship. I'll
write that down in my “great ideas” file and keep going. You can
see how I incorporated some information on social and historical
contexts in Sample Essay Two (pp. 177-87).
Social and historical contexts can illuminate works of literature
in many ways. We can use them to make our observations about lit-
erature more precise and more profound. Knowing more about the
domestic and family life of people in the 1930s helps us to see more
exactly the qualities of the relationship depicted in the poem: they
stand out in contrast much more clearly, now that we know some-
thing about the background. Social and historical contexts must
always be tied directly to the poem itself; it’s not enough to know
that things were going on in a general way at the time the poem
was written. I'm writing this, for example, during the COvVID-19
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RESEARCH ABOUT SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
pandemic, and during the run-up to the 2020 US election; both of
these things are weighing on me and affecting my daily life. But
they don’t really have much to do with what I'm writing here. In
our work about “This Is Just To Say,” we didn’t bother to follow up
on biographical details about Williams's life or on historical topics
about his time that weren't referred to in the poem. And we also
need to stick close to the poem so that we don’t commit a biograph-
ical fallacy and imagine that we see the poet himself in its lines
rather than his invented persona, who is actually speaking in the
poem. But handled as evidence, information about social and his-
torical contexts can greatly enrich our analysis of literary works.
And we can learn plenty along the way. Forty-four hours a week!
Good grief!
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How can we narrow the social context of a work of
literature to useful topics?
2. How can biographies be useful in identifying contexts
that are relevant to the study of literature?
3. What is the biographical fallacy?
4. Why do we read a lot more than we can use when we are
doing research?
5. How many times do you think you would read “This Is
Just To Say” if you were writing an essay about it? Why
do we reread so often in literary studies?
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CHAPTER FIVE
Research about
the Current Critical
Assessment of Literary Works
YOU WILL SOMETIMES BE ASKED TO REFER TO “SECONDARY
sources” in your essays, which usually means critical essays and
books. Critical essays and books are written by professionals in the
field of literary studies. They may be professors or instructors, they
may be graduate students {especially doctoral students), or they may
be independent scholars. Whatever their occupation, they have been
trained as researchers and writers. If they hold doctorate degrees,
they've ten years or more studying at college or university (or a
combination of the two). An article can take years to develop and
publish; a book much longer than that. Articles and books usually
go through a long process of revision and improvement, and their
publication is acknowledgment of their excellence. Having an essay
published in a scholarly journal is like having a painting chosen
for a major exhibition, getting an award for best performance at
work or at school, or earning a medal in an athletic competition.
It’s tough to do, and it takes years of practice and a fair amount of
talent to pull off.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Good critical writing both acknowledges the critical history to
which it belongs and distinguishes itself from that history. In other
words, the best critiques build upon past criticism but offer fresh
insights and new perspectives. Critical essays and books will devote
a lot of space to establishing the relationship between the new ideas
and the old ones. In consequence, quite a bit of the material in
critical essays and books will be concerned with things that are not
familiar to you—and, to be truthful, that you might not find very
illuminating. And the technical vocabulary of literary studies may
also be a foreign language to you, as literary theory freely imports
terms from other languages, especially Greek, Latin, French, and
German. The terminology of literary theory also borrows from
philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and psychoanalysis, history,
sociology, feminism, gender studies, political theory, postcolonial
studies, game theory, linguistics, rhetoric ... the list is endless. It’s
no surprise, then, that you might find reading and using critical
essays and books challenging, that you might feel as if the works of
literary criticism you try to read are part of a universe to which you
do not belong (and may not even want to visit!).
As in other disciplines, the specialized vocabulary and discur-
sive density of literary criticism are necessary features of the ways
in which people with advanced knowledge and professional respon-
sibilities talk about things. Medical researchers, for instance, don’t
talk in plain, ordinary language: they speak of the many systems in
the human body, and they use disciplinary vocabulary to describe
phenomena and treatment. They have to: it wouldn’t be helpful to
your orthopedic surgeon to read the instructions, “If the patient’s
leg hurts, try cutting into it and getting at the problem.” It wouldnt
help your leg much either. We trust medical professionals to know
what they are doing when they talk the way they do; we should
also trust that humanities professionals know what they are doing
when they use language that most people wouldnt recognize and
talk about things that most people have never heard of. They have
important work to do, decoding the record of human experience as
it is contained in literature, and they've developed ways to make
their communication most efficient and precise.
You are not expected to be able to understand this discourse
fully or to be able to use its terms comfortably, in the way that
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
professional critics do. But you can get a start: before you finish
your undergraduate or college degree, you should have some expos-
ure to the language, the methodologies, and the discoveries of the
professional discourse of English studies. If your instructor expects
you to do so, then they are prepared to support you in your efforts.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. The aim of this chapter is not to
replace the support your instructors and librarians can give but to
offer a few strategies that will help you to identify and locate useful
critical works, read them constructively, and use them as evidence
in your own essays.
FINDING CRITICAL WORKS
Assessing Publications
Professional academics in the humanities publish their findings in
journals and books. The most valuable of these, for both the schol-
arly writer and reader, are what are called “peer-reviewed” works.
This means that the article or book undergoes a process of assess-
ment by other professionals in the field before it can be accepted
for publication. Typically, publications in peer-reviewed journals
are double-blind refereed, which means that the name of the author
is removed from the manuscript and the names of the “readers” or
peer reviewers are not revealed to the author. The work is evaluated
according to its merit and not on the basis of personal relationships
or status. Normally, reviewers are asked to assess the originality of
the findings; the quality of the scholarship, including the review of
past work relevant to the topic; the importance of the findings and
the areas of knowledge to which they contribute; and, finally, the
quality of the writing. You can find out whether a journal is peer
reviewed by looking at its website and investigating its “submission
guidelines”; the example in the text box will tell you more. Books
are a little bit harder to assess, but, normally, anything published
by a university press or by a trade publisher that publishes a lot of
academic work will also be of the best quality.
Though peer-reviewed material is now widely available on the
Internet, much of the material found in a web search will not be
peer reviewed. Peer-reviewed works online will be intermingled
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
with a lot of material of more dubious quality. Some of these online
offerings might well be valuable and intelligent, but many of them
will not be, and some could have very bad information that might
well ruin your good efforts. You should trust your library and its
catalogues and resources before you trust material from the larger
infosphere when you are looking for literary criticism. The library
employs people to sift out the best and make it available to you. And,
with so many electronic resources available through the library, it’s
almost as convenient (and less likely to backfire) if you get your
sources through the library rather than through other means.
THE SCHOLARLY JOURNAL
The William Carlos Williams Review is a journal devoted
to the poet’s work. It has a website that gives information
about the journal, how to subscribe, and how to submit works
to it. Under “Submission Guidelines,” the editor writes, “The
author’s name should only appear on the cover sheet as the
manuscript must be anonymous, with no reference to the
author appearing in the text.” This information means that
the “refereeing” is blind. The members of the Editorial Board
for each issue are also listed, and they are experts in the area.
These details mean that The William Carlos Williams
Review is a peer-reviewed journal, and they are guarantees of
the quality and suitability of the content for students of litera-
ture, and especially for students of Williams's work.
Using Bibliographies
A bibliography is a collection of references to scholarship. There are
thousands of bibliographies in print, and most are now available in
electronic form. For work in English studies, the main bibliography
is the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, which
should be available to you through your library's website. Now elec-
tronic, the MLA International Bibliography has been collecting and
organizing references to publications in the area of language and lit-
erary study since 1926. Annually, it indexes more than 6,000 journals
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
and book series published by a huge number of publishers. The search
interface has been developed over many years and is very sophisti-
cated and fine-grained; each entry is extensively tagged or labeled to
allow for complex searches involving many terms. The interface for
the MLAIB conveniently separates the search returns into types of pub-
lication, including “peer-reviewed journals,” “books,” and “chapters in
books.” This categorization will help you select high-quality resources.
“I’M HERE TO HELP YOU”:
YOUR LIBRARIAN
There are other bibliographies that are available in electronic
interfaces, and your library will have subscriptions to many of
these. Librarians are great resource people, and you should take
advantage of the services they offer. They can let you know if
the World Shakespeare Bibliography or ITER: Gateway to
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as examples, would
be useful to you. And they can help you figure out how to use
these and other databases.
One of the challenges in using a database like the MLAIB, which
has millions of unique and complex items in it, is to construct your
search so that you collect enough—but not too many—references to
works that are relevant to your project. One thing to do is to remem-
ber that you are building an argument that you've already started
to assemble; you have plenty of evidence already from your reading
of the primary material and from your reading in reference works.
(You should never use a search of secondary sources to identify a
topic; you must be led by what you already know.) I reread “This Is
Just To Say,” and I review my notes, so as to be sure I will build on
my previous research. I'm reminded that my interests include the
domestic setting of the poem, the intimacy of the communication,
the marital situation, and how the writing expresses those things.
I'll try to work these topics into my searches.
I start by looking for items about the work I am centrally con-
cerned with. When I search for “This Is Just To Say” in “anywhere”
I get only a handful of “hits”—only nine in total—and only five of
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
these are to articles in “peer-reviewed journals”; none is a book.
When I look at the list of “peer-reviewed journal” entries, only one
of these seems interesting to me. It’s an article by Charles Altieri
published in a journal called Critical Inquiry. As the interface for
the MLAIB allows me to save items that I select, I'll check this one
off and get back to it later. I've got to try a broader search so that I
can retrieve more references that are going to help me. Now I'll try
“William Carlos Williams” (without quotation marks), “anywhere.”
This search results in too many items: 946 in total and 383 of these
in peer-reviewed journals. I have to find a way to narrow this search
without missing important items that might be relevant to my inter-
est in “This Is Just To Say.”
JOURNALS OR BOOKS?
Because peer-reviewed journals are often available online
and because they are shorter than books, they can be easier
to handle as research resources. By all means, use them. But
if you find that they refer to key books on your topic or that
you don’t have as much evidence as you'd like from secondary
sources using just articles, go back to the MLAIB and begin to
go through the books listed in your search results.
There are various ways to narrow your search. As we discussed
in the last chapter, you can use Boolean operators to restrict your
search results to items in which two or more areas of interest appear.
You can limit by giving further particulars about the genre you are
interested in (“poetry,” for example), by describing an additional
topic you are interested in (“women” or “modernism”), or by date
of publication, sometimes referred to as “date range.” I find “date
range” particularly useful; I will often limit my search to the last
ten years of publications. If I can find a few items in that list that
concern my interests, they will refer me to works published in the
past that might also be of interest to me. This is one of the advan-
tages of the requirement in professional scholarship that the author
acknowledge where his or her argument sits in relation to what has
been said on the topic before.
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
My initial search for “William Carlos Williams” returned many
more items than I could possibly look through. I tried various ways
of narrowing the search while still leaving me with enough items
for a solid research base. I tried narrowing the date range to “2000
to the present, which reduced the number of items listed to 135 in
total, of which 69 were peer-reviewed articles and 17 were books. On
my “to do” list, I added two of these books and six articles. Then
I checked on the availability of these works. The books are in my
library, and several of the articles are available in the print journals
collection. Five articles are available electronically; as I'm working
at home, I'll try those first. If I need to do more research after that,
I'll continue with a day at the library in the coming week.
>
SEARCH TIPS
You are seeking search results that will be relevant to your
interests and manageable in terms of volume.
- Begin with a search specific to your interests.
. If that doesn’t work, do a very broad search.
. Narrow with a Boolean operator such as AND or by date
range.
- Follow up on works that are cited within articles and
books that you find helpful, if you feel you need to do
more research.
Students often ask how many secondary sources they should
use. Your instructor may have a different answer than I give to
that question, so ask your instructor if they haven't already speci-
fied. Your instructor might want you to become more familiar with
literary critical discourse and may require that you read and refer
to three or four articles, for instance. When I am asked this ques-
tion, what I usually say is this: “Use as many as you need to make
the argument you want to make.” You may get all you need from a
couple of articles, the OED, and an encyclopedia or two. You may
need to use more sources in order to make your argument, and you
will certainly need to read more than you use. But keep in mind
that the objective of the essay is to offer a strong, deep, and sharp
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
argument, so measure your research efforts by whether they have
helped you meet that goal. If they haven’t, do more. If they have, you
can probably stop there.
USING YOUR LIBRARY’S ASSETS
My library has a service that allows me to print or email my
marked list. Before or after printing or emailing, I can turn
the references (or citations, as they are often called) into a list
that is formatted in the form I want for my list of “Works Cited”
or my “Bibliography,” whichever my instructor (which in this
case is me!) has asked for. Although the results must be checked
carefully, this step can save me a few minutes and make sure
that I have all the information I need to submit with my essay.
READING CRITICAL WORKS
When you read critical works, you are looking for further evidence
for the essay you are working on. Focus on finding information that
will help you in one or more of the following ways:
1. It will confirm and strengthen the ideas, feelings, and
insights you have already had.
2. It will enhance or supplement the ideas, feelings, and
insights you have already had.
3. It will give you new knowledge and may correct
misunderstandings or challenge perceptions you have
already had.
4. It will help you stage the argument that you will make in
your essay.
5. It can help you challenge ideas that you don’t find
persuasive in order to strengthen your own argument.
You will learn more about the practice of literary criticism and the
methods of literary theory as you read, but don’t get hung up on
trying to figure out every term or reference. Certainly, these details
are important, but you do not have time for them at the moment.
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
The time to decide to devote your life to literary theory and literary
criticism hasn’t yet arrived; when it does, you will be ready! For now,
you have a deadline to meet and an assignment to complete.
Typically, you will want to skim through articles, even just
the first few pages and perhaps the conclusion, before you decide
which to read more carefully. You can be mistaken, as I was when I
started “Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The Example of
Williams’ “This Is Just to Say’ by Charles Altieri. On the first page
I saw the names “Aristotle,” “Derrida,” and “Wittgenstein” (and not
Williams); I thought, “This article is more about theory than it is
about Williams, and I'm not sure it’s going to be very useful. And
I don’t have time to reread Aristotle, Derrida, and Wittgenstein: I
have a deadline, after all.” A good rule is to be wary of literary criti-
cism that assumes you are on a “last-name-only” basis with major
theorists of the last 2,500 years, as if you were at boarding school or
summer camp with them! I'm kidding, but I'm also serious: much
of the literary criticism of the last quarter of the twentieth century
was as much about theory as it was about literature. But—a word of
warning!—in this case I was wrong: I returned to the Altieri article
later, as so many other articles that I read referred to it that I thought
I must have misjudged it. And indeed I had. (Confessing to one’s
mistakes and oversights is a pleasure often granted the researcher.)
When I read the Altieri article more thoroughly, 1 found that
the last ten pages of the article were devoted to a close reading of
“This Is Just To Say.” Altieri has some very good points to make that
help me identify ways in which the poem’s style makes the poem
seem more intimate. For instance, he points out that “This” in the
title is a deictic, a word that points to something and depends on
context for meaning, as if we can all see “this” thing, as if we are in
the same small space. Altieri also helped me clarify and extend my
sense of the nature of the speaker’s apology. Altieri writes, “The
justness of the speaker’s note is its recognition of his weakness and
its lovely combination of self-understanding with an implicit faith
in his wife's capacity to understand and accept his deed and, beyond
that, to comprehend his human existence as a balance of weakness,
self-knowledge, and concern” (501). In one sentence, Altieri has con-
nected the language of the poem with the intimacy and love that
I detected in it. I can use this statement, and others by Altieri, to
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confirm my sense of the poem and to enhance and supplement my
comments about those topics.
After reading the five articles on my list, I have decided that
two (by Bob Johnson and Daniel Morris), while interesting, are not
relevant to my essay. Johnson's article is about politics, and Morris’s
is about homoeroticism and the visual arts in Williams’s work. The
other three are relevant, and I take extensive notes from each of
them. Like Altieri’s, Celia Carlson’s article helps me sharpen and
clarify the feelings and ideas I already had. She writes, for instance,
that “Objects in Williams's poems, far from being ‘innocent’ arte-
facts in the world, demonstrate the quality of Williams's relations
with himself and his others” (C. Carlson 27), which will help me
write about the plums and the icebox. Theodora Graham's article is
the most interesting to me, and I read it carefully and thoroughly. It
is centrally concerned with Williams’s representation in his writing
of marriage in general and of his marriage in particular. Graham
puts her finger on something I had sensed but wasn’t sure how to
articulate: “wherever she [the speaker’s wife] appears, the writing
is not about her but about her relation to him” (Graham 170). By and
large, according to Graham, Williams’s writing reflects his convic-
tion that marriage was both what kept him grounded in the present
and the material and what prevented him from fulfilling himself as
a writer and genius. “In the drama of their life together, one of the
most compelling stories he knew, Williams portrayed himself as
the tormented artist, repeatedly tempted to overthrow his conven-
tional life—represented by Flossie—and repeatedly retreating into
the familiar and certain still center she provided” (Graham 170).
Graham’s article supports my previous insights, extends them, and
offers me new information gained from her extensive knowledge
of Williams's work and biography. (For instance, I wasn’t aware
that Williams was frequently unfaithful to his wife and that his
struggles around this fact are one of the topics of his verse.)
All three articles contribute to how I might be able to stage my
argument. Each says, explicitly or implicitly, that the relationship
between men and women, especially the marital relationship, is
one of the enduring, even obsessive concerns in Williams’s work.
The authors of these articles do not entirely agree: Carlson leans
toward criticizing Williams for objectifying women (although she
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
is generous and thoughtful in her appraisal); Graham portrays
the poet’s feelings and ideas about women as the grounds for tre-
mendous personal and artistic struggle; Altieri sees a much more
peaceful heart at the center of the domestic scene than do the others.
I can characterize this collection of views in such a way that can
help me stage what I want to say. I might write, for instance, that
critics do not entirely agree and briefly describe these three views.
Then I could say that I would like to measure “This Is Just To Say”
in relation to the poles these critics have established. Recalling the
historical and social research that I have done, I think I can add that
to the reading with some background information about the era in
which the poem was written.
I am satisfied that the research I've done in the secondary
sources is sufficient for my essay. I know the essays I've read are
good quality, and I believe I've got a fairly representative sample of
critical opinion on the topics that interest me—although I know my
research hasn’t been exhaustive. (If I were writing for publication, I
would have to make sure that my research was exactly that: exhaust-
ively exhaustive, thoroughly thorough, completely complete! But,
as a student, you are not writing for publication.) I may find when
I go to pull the essay together that there are some bits and pieces
missing in the architecture. If that’s the case, I can return to my
notes and to the list of references I collected in my search process.
If I need to check a few additional things then, I will be able to. For
now, though, I'm ready to move on to organizing my evidence and
starting to build my argument.
TAKING NOTES FROM CRITICAL READINGS
Let’s remember that most of the time you spend working on an
essay should be spent in doing and organizing the research. If you
spend the time doing that, you will save time writing and make the
last part of the essay preparation the easiest and most satisfying.
Careful notes from your secondary sources will help.
As soon as I decide I am going to skim a critical essay or book, I
make sure have all the bibliographic information, and I open a file with
that information at the top. I name the file with the topic and the last
name of the author of the essay or book (e.g., “Williams _altieri.doc”).
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
I find this is a good way to keep track of my notes, but you may have
other ways of handling your files. Whatever you do, be consistent and
thorough. There is just about nothing worse in the course of writ-
ing an essay than having to track down a quotation or an idea that
you've neglected to write down or properly document in your notes.
In my notes, I try to put a summary of the argument or field of
the essay at the top, unless that is evident from the title. This can
be very brief (say “feminism plus biography, reading of Williams’s
poetry, comparing early and late”); it’s just to remind me of the
work and to help me decide later if it’s useful to go back to it or
if it’s the source of the quotation I'm looking for. I then copy out
quotations that interest me, just as I noted evidence from the poem
itself. I try not to decide beforehand how I'm going to use the quo-
tation, although, by this point, my selections are starting to be
made on the basis of my ideas about the literature I am studying. I
copy them out, rather than using shortcuts to copy and paste, for
two reasons. One is that I believe firmly that copying them out
helps me to look at each word and understand them better. Two is
that 1 don’t want to bring in a huge amount of material that will
take a long time to go over; copying and pasting encourages quan-
tity over quality, and I will regret that later. You do what you like,
but I am always glad that I've taken the time to make careful notes.
1 type very quickly, though; there is that to consider.
MANAGING YOUR TIME
WHEN WRITING ESSAYS
There’s no great shortcut to the writing of good essays. I find
that the easiest way to think about the long road to the finished
essay is to understand that you are really trying to learn in
the process and to produce something special for your reader;
those things take time. A great speech, a beautiful painting,
a super computer program—none of these is made overnight.
Generally speaking, I think you should count on a full day’s
work for every page of the essay. I would divide that roughly
into one-third reading and rereading of the primary text or
texts, one-third other reading, and one-third writing time.
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
1 try to label each quotation with something that will cue me to
its main point later, again for my review of the notes. In the case of
the essay I'm developing about the Williams poem, I might label the
notes “intimacy,” “woman/wife,” “style,” and so on, loosely reflect-
ing the categories that I began to develop when I did my first close
reading of the poem and that I further expanded when I read around
in reference works and social and historical materials. I do all this
so that, when I come to organize my evidence, I can make easy
matches between the primary and secondary materials, between
the poem and the critical statements that apply to it.
I also take notes in my list of great ideas, which is really grow-
ing. I'm looking forward to reading it over and getting that warm,
happy feeling I get from seeing how smart I really am! I'm jok-
ing—but you will probably be pleasantly surprised when you look
over your list. It’s a general rule that we are smarter over time than
we are in the moment, so the record of your insights will be richer
and broader than what you think right now about the same things.
Here is a list of reflections I've had as a result of my critical
reading; I will add these to my list of great ideas:
»
1. There is support in the criticism for my idea that marriage
is a central concern of “This Is Just To Say.” Critics also
claim that marriage and fidelity are enduring concerns of
Williams’s poetry as a whole (Altieri 500-01; Graham 163,
170).
2. There is some critical disagreement about Williams’s ideas
about women. I may be able to situate my perception of the
representation in “This Is Just To Say” of the woman and
the speaker’s relationship to her in relation to this range of
views (Altieri 501; C. Carlson 27; Graham 164-66).
3. One critic (C. Carlson) says that objects in Williams’s
poems represent Williams's feelings about himself and
others. So the “plums” are plums, but they might also be
used to express and focus the speaker’s feelings, or the
feelings between the speaker and another person pictured
in the poem (C. Carlson 27).
4. Celia Carlson also says that there is critical interest in
how sensuousness is expressed in poetry and that “much
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
of Williams’s energy in his lyric poetry comes from his
attempts to harness what he viewed in rather traditional
terms as the feminine power of the body” (27).
5. Critics generally reinforce my sense that the language
choices are what give the impression of intimacy and
materiality (Altieri 499-500).
You can now review Sample Essay Three (pp. 189-201) to see how I
incorporated critical works into my essay on the poem.
CONCLUSION
Reading literary criticism written by professionals is hard. You are
not expected to be fluent in the languages of literary theory or to
chat easily about the critical history of works that you are studying.
What you may be expected to do is to read selected works of criti-
cism, grasp something of their arguments, and isolate statements
that can be used as evidence to support your argument in your essay.
Seek out refereed articles and books published by university presses;
use the resources made available through your library, including the
catalogue, bibliographies, and works themselves; construct searches
so as to produce enough relevant results but not too many to handle.
Focus on collecting evidence that will confirm, enhance, challenge,
or correct your ideas and feelings and that will help you stage your
argument. Ask questions of your instructors and your librarians,
use your library's tools, and take careful notes. Give yourself enough
time to understand what you read and to reflect on the ideas you
are collecting. Most of all, don’t panic: do the best you can. Do it
carefully and honestly, and the results will be good. In fact, I wager
the results will be better than you expected. And you may even like
criticism which, as arcane and baroque as it may sometimes seem,
is comprised of the best efforts of great minds to work carefully and
honestly through the reasons that literature does what it does to
us—it changes our minds, moves our hearts, and opens our speech
to new words, new concepts, and new ways of being.
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THE CURRENT CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF LITERARY WORKS
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Why is literary criticism often hard to understand?
What are some techniques to use to narrow a search in a
large database?
What does a “double-blind peer-review” process mean?
Why are works available on the web not as reliable as ones
available through your library?
What should you use secondary sources for?
83
CHAPTER SIX
Inventing Your
Argument
ESSAYS IN ENGLISH STUDIES ARE ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE
meaning, power, or structure of works of literature. By “argument,”
I mean the definition given in the OED: “A connected series of
statements or reasons intended to establish a position (and, hence,
to refute the opposite); a process of reasoning.” Arguments in
English studies present an interpretation based on evidence. The
interpretation is logically organized so as to persuade the reader of
its strength. Implicitly or explicitly, the author acknowledges that
this argument is not the only possible one about a topic. Detectives
and scientists always seek the best possible explanation for the
phenomena that they analyze, but they know that there may be
other plausible explanations. Literary works are so complex that
there is no single “right” answer about their meaning, why they
are powerful and in what ways, or how they are built so as to pro-
duce those meanings and those effects. But there are stronger and
weaker arguments, and your essay will be judged on the strength
of its argument.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
Professional literary critics have to produce arguments that are
original—that have never been made before. You don’t have to do that.
What you have to do is produce arguments from your unique perspec-
tive, arguments that accurately reflect the material you are working
on, that make sense, that interest the reader, and that tell them some-
thing they might not have thought of before. You can imagine your
reader as an accomplished, hard-working, engaged student such as
yourself: work to persuade and impress that reader with your artful
argument and your command of evidence. Imagine yourself also open
to their questions and objections; imagining a different point of view
will improve your argument. But imagine also the satisfaction you
both will feel in having shared some good ideas, supported precisely by
evidence, about something about which you have common experience.
We've worked hard on gathering evidence, which is the best
guarantee of a strong argument. Now we need to know more about
how to organize that evidence, make statements about it, connect
those statements, and communicate their importance to our under-
standing of the work of literature with which the essay is concerned.
After that, we'll put on the finishing touches: making sure the struc-
ture of the argument is perfect, checking the grammar and spelling,
preparing the list of works cited, and confirming that the presenta-
tion is just right.
ARRANGING YOUR EVIDENCE
Reviewing Your Labeled Evidence
Throughout this book, I have emphasized working from evidence
to argument, rather than the other way around. You will learn more
this way, and your essay will be stronger and more interesting. If you
have been working with the methods outlined in this book, you have
collected evidence from at least two sources: your first impressions
and your close reading of the work of literature itself. You may also
have collected evidence from these sources:
. other works by the same author;
. other works by authors contemporary with the one you are
researching;
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INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
the introduction and annotations to scholarly editions;
biographies and biographical articles in reference works;
dictionaries, especially the Oxford English Dictionary;
encyclopedias, including specialized ones devoted to
literature or culture in the national and temporal realms of
the work you are studying;
works about the social and historical contexts of the
literature; and
critical essays and books.
In each case, I've asked you to label your evidence. Let’s consider, for
a moment, our evidence gathering for the essay on “This Is Just To
Say.” The labels attached to quotations from the poem relate your
perceptions of the meaning, power, and structure of the work to
the parts of the poem that provoked those perceptions. The labels
on quotations from your other reading connect these quotations to
your ideas, both original and developing. This evidence and these
labels will help take you from your first impressions to the argument
that will comprise your essay. Your essay will therefore be neatly
and firmly connected to you—the writer—and to the material the
essay is about—the literature. Heres how to proceed.
Categorizing Your Evidence
It’s time to go back and read your evidence—all of it—again. Review
your list of first impressions and your quotations from the poem,
from reference works, from works about social and historical con-
texts, and from any critical works you've read that you found useful.
These are the building blocks of your essay; if they are strong, chan-
ces are the essay will also be strong. So assess whether you've got a
pile of good bricks. If you have, the next task is to fit them together
into a form that is functional and pleasing. That’s what the next
process is about.
Look at the labels youve assigned to the evidence. You may
have 15 or 20 or even more different labels; you probably want 4, 5,
or 6, in the end. If some overlap or duplicate others, merge them
together. If some of the evidence doesn’t fit in the new categories,
then set it aside; it may not have a place in this essay.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
In my work on “This Is Just To Say,” I've got a lot of labels:
food . everyday language
sensual pleasure (Anglo-Saxon?)
communication . visual word
intimacy . transgression?
naughtiness . eroticism
poet/persona/recipient of . marriage
the note (identification?) . the feminine
definite articles . domesticity
verb tense . marriage in society
imperative mood . Flossie as wife in poems
deictics . Williams and marriage
material world . things and relations
I need to reduce the number of categories I have here. Roughly
speaking, I'm looking to have one category for each of the subtop-
ics in my essay. Here I'll reduce my categories to five, into which I
can slot most of my labeled items:
1. LANGUAGE (communications, poet/persona, everyday
language, definite articles, deictics, verb tense)
2. MATERIAL REALITY (food, domesticity, things and
relations)
3. MARRIAGE (marriage in society, Flossie as wife, Williams
and marriage)
4. SENSUOUSNESS (sensual pleasure, visual word)
5. EMOTION (intimacy, naughtiness, transgression,
imperative mood)
I’m still not sure what my argument (my little brick shed, if you will
allow me to work this metaphor a little) is going to be, but things
are beginning to take shape. You'll notice I have made some judg-
ment calls, and they indicate how my mind is starting to shape the
argument. I've put “visual word” under “sensucusness” rather than
under “language,” for instance, because I'm specifically interested
in the evocative, sensual effects of “plums.” After doing this, I real-
ize that I can probably move all of the language items into the other
88
INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
categories, bringing my categories down to four. I like this move,
in part because it balances things out and in part because it will
strengthen the evidence I have in each category, as I will have a
piece of linguistic evidence for each topic: this suits the study of
literature, which, after all, is made of language. So my recast list
is as follows:
1. MATERIAL REALITY (food, domesticity, things and
relations, everyday language, deictics, verb tense)
2. MARRIAGE (marriage in society, Flossie as wife, Williams
and marriage, poet/persona)
3. SENSUOUSNESS (sensual pleasure, visual word, definite
articles)
4. EMOTION (intimacy, naughtiness, transgression,
imperative mood, communications)
Now my categories are balanced, each having about the same num-
ber of items in it.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS, REVIEWED
My first impressions, from my close reading of the poem, were
as follows:
1. “This Is Just To Say” is about sensual, moral, and
interpersonal experience in the material, everyday
world.
2. “This Is Just To Say” is about relationships between
people and about how these relationships are shaped
by the use of language.
3. “This Is Just To Say” is about poetry and how it is dif-
ferent or the same as everyday acts of communication.
When I review my first impressions (consult the text box), I
see that they have been strengthened, enriched, and supplemented
by my research, and I know that the combination of gut response
or first impressions and the more textured, nuanced, and detailed
observations that have come through my reading outside of the
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
poem will make for a good essay: 1 will be writing about what I
believe and feel, but I will be doing so in a logical, objective fashion.
It’s this combination that the process of reading and rereading that
I have emphasized produces, and it is a process that will make the
writing of the essay as easy as it can be. This process reflects the
combination of the subjective element (you, the researcher and essay
writer) and the object of your investigation (the work of literature),
a combination that I describe in Chapter One and that forms the
foundation of all essays about literature.
Charting Your Evidence
I will now arrange my evidence in these categories. Typically, I
actually make a chart or table, either using my word processor or
on a large sheet of paper. (I have special huge graph paper just for
this purpose! But that’s just one of my idiosyncrasies; I love graph
paper. I have colored pencils and markers that I use to make the
charts. I tape them up on the wall above my desk, so that, when I'm
writing, I can refer to them.) You could just head a file with each
category and cut and paste into that file all of the evidence you
have collected that belongs in that category; then you will be able
to reorder the evidence as your argument begins to take shape. You
can bring these categories together in one file after you've made
separate files for each category, or you can keep the category files
separate and use another file to bring pieces together as you need
them. Using computer files to arrange your categorized evidence is
probably more efficient than making a chart on graph paper, which
takes time and can get messy with reorganizing. Some people like
to use brainstorming software or textual databases (you can use
spreadsheet programs to make textual databases). Some like mov-
ing around sheets of paper, highlighting in different colors, or
using categorized index cards arranged in piles around the room.
Whatever works for you—the important thing is to line up your
evidence in categories.
The charts I've prepared for this chapter are abbreviated; in
your own, you could put whole quotations or paraphrases, and you
must make sure that you have attached to your categorized evidence
the information about the sources you've used because you'll need
9C
INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
to document your references. {In my charting of evidence from the
poem, for example, I've put line numbers beside each bit taken from
“This Is Just To Say.”) Once you're finished your chart, you will have
a map of your essay, and you'll be able to work from the map to find
your way home.
First Version of My Chart: Evidence from Poem
MATERIAL REALITY MARRIAGE SENSUQUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2 i Title “I have eaten” 1 Title
: “the icebox” 4 ‘ “I/me,” “you” “delicious” 10 I/me,” “you”
E i “breakfast” 8 i “icebox” 4 “sweet” 11 Forgive me” 9
g “that” 3, “which” 5 “breakfast” 8 “cold” 12
~~ i (deictics} i {domesticity}
: i “you were probably
i saving” 6-7
That’s a good start. Now I'll look over my findings from the
reference works. This is what I observe after reading them through.
From the dictionary, I learned (or was reminded) that a
plum is both a fruit and a color.
From the dictionary, I learned that most of the words used
in the poem derive from Old English and are older and
simpler words compared to others in modern English.
From the scholarly edition, I confirmed that Williams
wrote the poem as if it were a note to his wife, that he
wrote it in 1934, and that, later, he wrote a “Reply” to it in
her voice.
From the biographical article, I learned that Williams
was a doctor and a father and that he and Florence were
married for decades.
I'll categorize the first observation under “sensuousness,” the
second under “material reality,” and the fourth under “marriage.”
I'm not sure about the third one. It’s definitely about communi-
cations, but it’s also about marriage. I look back over my longer
list of labels, and I see that I've put “communications” under emo-
tion. It seems counter-intuitive not to put the third observation
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
under marriage, but I'm trying to stay disciplined and stick to my
categories and what informed them. So I'm going to put the third
observation, about the fact that the poem is written in the style of
a note, under “emotion” in my chart.
Second Version of My Chart:
Evidence from the Poem and from Reference Works
MATERIAL REALITY MARRIAGE SENSUOUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2 i Title “I have eaten” 1 Title
“the icebox” 4 “Ime,” “you” “delicious” 10 “I/me,” “you”
“breakfast” 8 “icebox” 4 “sweet” 11 “Forgive me” 9 E : 8 g [“that”3, “which” 5 i “breakfast” 8 “cold” 12
~~ (deictics) i (domesticity)
i “you were probably
i saving” 6-7
8 ., | Dictionary: Biography: Dictionary: Edition:
S ¥ | Old English words i Williams's plum “Reply” 3.2 : i
‘5 2 i marriage [4 :
My research into social and historical contexts for “This Is Just To
Say” has given me a few more ideas to add to my list.
For a woman in 1934, domestic life was labor intensive,
although less so than it had been (Coleman et al. 52).
The wife was more isolated in the home than she had been
in previous eras, when an extended family and employees
might have shared the house (Coleman et al. 56).
Food was an important part of women’s lives (Coleman et al.
52). The refrigerator changed the pattern of housewives’ lives:
they cooked less and shopped more (Coleman et al. 56).
When the poem was written, there was ideological support
for the nuclear family (A. Carlson 64), which led to pressure
on marriage to be a more intimate and personally rewarding
relationship than it had been before (Brown 75, 31).
Looking at my chart, I think I'll put the first and third observa-
tions under “material reality,” the second under “emotion,” and
divide the fourth between “marriage” and “sensuousness” (on
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INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
the basis that intimacy might involve sensuality in one form or
another). As you can see, some of the evidence could go under
more than one category, and, in the end, I may find a particular
piece more useful in a different category. For now, however, I'm
not worried about that.
Third Version of My Chart: Adding Evidence about Social Context
MATERIAL REALITY MARRIAGE SENSUOUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2 : Title iq have eaten” 1 ‘ Title
“the icebox” 4 “Tfme,” “you” i“delicious” 10 “lime,” “you”
“breakfast” 8 : “icebox” 4 sweet” 11 ; “Forgive me” 9
g “that” 3, “which” 5 “breakfast” 8 i“cold” 12 ‘
A (deictics) : (domesticity) ;
{“you were probably :
‘ saving” 6-7 {
8 | Dictionary: : Biography: i Dictionary: plum : Edition: “Reply”
2 = Old Englishwords | Williams's ;
5 2 marriage
Women’s work Nuclear family Intimacy in Wife isolated
labor intensive : : marriage :
Food an important
part of women’s lives ;
So ci
al an
d
Hi st or ic al Co
nt ex
ts
Finally, I got some information and support from researching
the literary criticism about the poem and about Williams’s poetry.
I summarized this evidence as follows (although I have files with
quotations to draw upon for the actual essay, as I do with the other
secondary sources).
1. There is support in the criticism for my idea that marriage
is a central concern of “This Is Just To Say.” Critics also
claim that marriage and fidelity are enduring concerns of
Williams’s poetry as a whole (Altieri 500-01; Graham 163,
170).
2. There is some critical disagreement about Williams’s ideas
about women (Altieri 501; C. Carlson 27; Graham 164-66).
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
3. One critic (C. Carlson) says that objects in Williams’s
poems represent Williams's feelings about himself and
others (C. Carlson 27).
4. Celia Carlson also says that there is critical interest in
how sensuousness is expressed in poetry and that “much
of Williams’s energy in his lyric poetry comes from his
attempts to harness what he viewed in rather traditional
terms as the feminine power of the body” (27).
5. Critics generally reinforce my sense that the language
choices are what give the impression of intimacy and
materiality (for example, Altieri 499-500).
I'll put the first and second ones in the “marriage” category, the
third in “material reality” and “emotion,” and the fourth ... hmmm.
The fourth seems to belong in all the categories. I'm going to leave
it aside for the moment. You'll notice I've put the third piece of evi-
dence in two categories, which is fine; I'll figure out when I write
the essay if it is best in one or the other or if there are a couple
of observations on that topic from the criticism that I can divide
between the two topics. No worries; we're still brainstorming.
THE EVIDENCE THAT WON'T FIT
Sometimes you have to set aside pieces of evidence if there’s
no category for them. But sometimes you'll find an observa-
tion or a set of observations in a critical work that seems to
crystallize what you've been thinking about the poem. If you
do, set it aside, as it could come in handy as a way to intro-
duce your topic. In this case, I've been unable to categorize
“Critics generally reinforce my sense that the language choices
are what give the impression of intimacy and materiality (for
example, Altieri 499-500)” because it seems to fall into all my
categories. It concurs with my initial impressions, so it does
seem to articulate what I've been thinking from the beginning.
This is very lucky for me, and I'll hold on to that idea and the
quotations that back it up for possible use in my introductory
paragraph.
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INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
Fourth Version of My Evidence Chart: Adding Evidence from Criticism
MATERIAL REALITY MARRIAGE SENSUOUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2 i Title i“T have eaten” 1 i Title
“the icebox™ 4 {“I/me,” “you” “delicious” 10 “Ime,” “you”
g | “breakfast”8 “icebox” 4 “sweet” 11 “Forgive me” 9
g “that” 3, “which” 5 i “breakfast” 8 “cold” 12 H
{deictics) : (domesticity)
i “you were probably |
i saving” 6-7
” Dictionary: : Biography: Dictionary: plum : Edition: “Reply
E Old-Englishwords | Williams's : :
Zz | marriage @ : b= € 2 & 3 ee
© | Women’s work ¢ Nuclear family i Intimacy in ‘ Wife isolated = . . : . :
- 2 labor intensive ; | marriage
5 § | Foodan important ; ;
© = | part of women’s lives : Qu : Ag
2 fer]
Objects and feelings : Marriage iscen- | Poetry and : Feelings and
(C. Carlson ¢ tral concern {| sensuousness i objects ]
g ; Williams and i and the feminine : {C. Carlson)
2 i women? (C. Carlson) g :
I'm happy with this chart. I don’t feel there are any gaps in it
that desperately need filling. If I did, I would review my files to
see if there’s something I've overlooked or something that could be
moved from one category to another. If there wasn’t, then I might
go back to the library. But it’s not necessary to have all the columns
and rows filled; in one section of your argument, social context
might provide important evidence that it doesn’t in other sections,
while, in another section, you might rely on the dictionary more
than on criticism. The only thing you must have in each category is
evidence from the works of literature you are studying.
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SECTION TWO: RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS
ALERT!
If you have a category that has no evidence from the primary
text(s) (in this case, “This Is Just To Say”), then you need to
rethink the categories or get that evidence. That’s the only type
of evidence that must appear in all the categories. Your essay
is, first and foremost, about the literature. So go back to the
literary work or works you are writing about or reformulate
your categories if you don’t have evidence from your primary
texts in each category.
CONCLUSION
I'm ready to start writing my essay now, to start composing my
argument, which will be “a connected series of statements or
reasons intended to establish a position (and, hence, to refute the
opposite); a process of reasoning.” Like any good argument, mine
will be based firmly on evidence. The evidence I need is all nicely
arranged and ready to be used—I won't be distracted when I am
writing it up by a missing page number or a lost quotation from
the poem. It’s a bit like baking: you're much better off to assemble
your ingredients first, make sure there is nothing missing, sort the
dry from the wet, let the butter soften, and even measure things
out—when you do this preparation, you're ready to mix things up
and create that beautiful cake. No need to rush out for vanilla while
the egg whites wilt and the oven heats up the kitchen. So we've got
everything ready, made sure nothing is missing, and now we just
need to assemble the batter and bake our cake. Or rather, I, the
essay writer, need to connect the statements and reasons intended
to establish my position and to present the whole as the result of a
process of reasoning. With icing and sprinkles on top!
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INVENTING YOUR ARGUMENT
REVIEW QUESTIONS
Why are there no single “right” answers to questions we
have about literary works?
What are the key words to remember about what an essay
is?
How are literary critics similar to detectives and scientists?
What kind of evidence is absolutely essential to your essay?
What should you do if there are gaps in your evidence
chart?
97
Section Three
COMPOSITION
CHAPTER SEVEN
Composing
Your Argument
THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT WRITING YOUR THESIS STATEMENT,
which is the outline of your argument. The thesis statement is a
summary of your argument: according to my old friend the Oxford
English Dictionary, a thesis in logic or composition is a “propos-
ition laid down or stated, especially as a theme to be discussed and
proved, or to be maintained against attack.” The thesis statement
describes the evidence you are using, states your interpretations of
this evidence, and brings those insights together into a conclusion
that is about the way the literature works, what it means, or how
and why it has the emotional impact it does.
Writing the thesis statement is half the burden of writing the
essay as a whole. It’s hard to do, and you should budget about half
your writing time for composing and revising it. It'll be the first and
last thing you work on in writing the essay. Apart from its import-
ance in setting out your argument, it is also significant because
it sets the first impression for your reader. So it must be written
as well as you can write, as clearly, economically, and precisely as
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
possible. Every word must be in the right place, and every place
must have the right word. When you have finished your thesis state-
ment, it should remind you of an enameled Easter egg or a rose
in bloom or a marvelous fruitcake: a beautiful thing, composed of
many parts brought together into a unique way to form a singular
and complete form.
INDUCTIVE REASONING
Arguments in literary criticism are instances of what is called induc-
tive reasoning. That means they analyze examples in order to come
to broader conclusions. If this ice cube is cold and that ice cube is
cold, we can conclude that it is likely that ice is cold. If an animal
has four legs, fur, and suckles its young, it is probably a mammal
and therefore can be grouped and studied with other similar ani-
mals. If you and Peter and Imelda all like Margaret Atwood’s novels,
you are likely to share other interests, and you might want to strike
up a friendship. If a novel examines the lives of women in various
circumstances, we can argue that it is concerned with the condition
of women in the society in which it is set. In all of your essays, your
argument should use inductive reasoning to move from particu-
lar pieces of evidence to broader generalizations about the work of
literature and its meaning, emotional power, and aesthetic value.
These generalizations may include statements about the author,
about literature in general, about social or historical issues, or about
combinations of these things. The important thing is to remember
that induction means going from the particular to the general, from
specific evidence to a general conclusion.
Arguments in literary criticism are not examples of deductive
reasoning. Deductive reasoning moves from general principles to
specific qualities. By and large, deductive reasoning is imprecise
and often incorrect when applied to phenomena as varied and rich
as literature. Here are some examples of deductive reasoning, which
proceeds from the general to the particular. If an animal is a mam-
mal, it probably has four legs, fur, and suckles its young; okay, that
example works, to a certain extent (whales are mammals without
four legs, as are humans, and neither has fur, exactly). If you, Peter,
and Imelda are friends, you probably all like the same books; this
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COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
example is less sturdy, as there are so many different kinds of books
and people are so infinitely complex that the conclusion is unlikely,
although possible. Another example: literature, taken as a whole,
is about truth, beauty, and the human condition; therefore, any
individual work of literature is about truth, beauty, and the human
condition. This statement is patently not true; there are many works
of literature about lies and ugliness, and some are about the percep-
tions and experiences of non-human creatures. Besides, we don’t
agree about what constitutes beauty, truth, or the human condition,
so the statement begs more questions than it answers, and it can
only be meaningful after those questions are resolved.
A great way to get your essay off to a terrible start is to make
a sweeping statement about literature or about human life and
imagine that this generalization somehow sets the stage for par-
ticular observations you are going to make about the work you are
studying. I warn my students that an opening sentence with the
words “since the beginning of time” or “people have always” or “it
is universally true” is a dud, so they have to go back to the drawing
board. Sometimes they tell me that they've been taught to open their
essays this way, and I believe them. But in college or university, we
try to argue from the specific to the general —and not the other way
around. And that first sentence is the most important sentence of
your essay; use it wisely and well.
COMPOSING THE THESIS STATEMENT
Writing the Subtopic Sentences
Please note that some instructors consider the “thesis statement” to
be a paragraph or multiple sentences, while others define it as the
single sentence that best sums up your argument in the essay. Below,
I'll talk about building and refining the opening paragraph of the
essay, a section that some of your professors will call the “introduc-
tion” and others will call the “thesis statement.” The process and
goals are the same even if the terminology is different!
Let’s remind ourselves that the strength of our arguments will
depend on the quality of our evidence and how we present it. So it
makes sense to begin with our evidence as we begin to build our
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
thesis statement. I'll review my chart and then write a sentence or
two summarizing the contents of each of my categories of evidence.
This way, my ideas are tied closely to the full range of evidence that
I've collected and included in my chart. Just to remind us of the
evidence, here is the fourth version of that chart:
Fourth Version of My Evidence Chart
MATERIAL REALITY MARRIAGE SENSUOUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2
“the icebox” 4
{ Title {“Ifme, you
“I have eaten” 1
: “delicious” 10 I/me,” “you”
E “breakfast” 8 i “icebox” 4 “sweet” 11 Forgive me” 9
¥ |“that” 3, "which" 5 “breakfast” 8 “cold” 12 [ os H i. :
{deictics) ; (domesticity) ;
i “you were probably :
‘ saving” 6-7
” Dictionary: : Biography: : Dictionary: plum Edition: “Reply”
I Old-Englishwords | Williams's :
z { marriage © H Qo H i=]
“2 & U [3
«| Women’s work Nuclear family Intimacy in Wife isolated
= $ | labor intensive : i marriage
g 8 Food an important ;
= — | partof women’s lives : 85 : “5
Ez
Objects and feelings Marriage is Poetry and Feelings and
{C. Carlson) : central concern : sensuousness objects
g i Williams and i and the feminine C. Carlson}
2 i women? i (C. Carlson) E : : E H
Reading down the columns, I'll summarize the information I
have in the chart. I'll write a sentence for each basic idea and use
the most precise words I can find.
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COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
MATERIAL REALITY: “This Is Just To Say” uses vocabulary
and grammatical choices to emphasize the material reality of
the scene it evokes. Set in a kitchen, at the locus of women’s
work in the period in which it was written, it ties the feelings
expressed and evoked in the poem to a specific relationship
between two people.
MARRIAGE: Marriage and his relationships with women in
general are central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos
Williams. “This Is Just To Say” is written as if it were an act
of communication between the speaker and his spouse.
SENSUOUSNESS: The vocabulary choices in the poem depict
the scene as being rich with sensory experience and imply
that the relationship between the poem’s speaker and the
person to whom the poem is addressed is also a sensual one.
EMOTION: The emotions expressed in the poem are pro-
found. At the same time, the mode of communication and the
“Reply” that Williams wrote later in the persona of the spouse
suggest remoteness and even isolation or alienation between
the “writer” of the note and its “reader.”
Composing the Body of the Introduction
When I review these sentences, I look for the sentence that most
clearly expresses the central topic of my research and ideas. In this
case, it’s the first sentence about marriage in Williams's poetry. If
I select “marriage” as my topic, I can talk about material reality,
sensuousness, emotion, the language that expresses these aspects
of the poem, and social and biographical contexts—all are related
to marriage. If, instead, I decided on “deictics” as my topic, would
have a tough time talking about plums; if I chose “sensuousness,’
I would have to wriggle around to discuss the icebox and how the
kitchen and food were central to women’s lives during the period.
3]
So I'll put that sentence on marriage first.
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
DECIDING ON YOUR TOPIC
This isn’t the only topic I could take for my essay from the
evidence that I've gathered. With some slight rearrangement,
I could craft an argument about communication, about poetry
and sensuousness, or about how the female is understood in
this poem. If | wasn’t satisfied that I had a strong topic, I would
go back to the evidence, reread it, review my categorization,
and see if that helped. If I was really stuck, I would go back to
my reading and try to cast the net a bit more widely. I hope by
this stage not to have to do that, but, if I have to, I will.
After deciding which summary sentences best convey the overarch-
ing idea of my essay and putting those first, all I need to do is to
make small changes to connect the other ideas (and sentences) to
one another and to my chosen focus. I've highlighted these changes
(by putting them in italics) in the paragraph I have come up with:
Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
The short poem “This Is Just To Say” is written as if it were
an act of communication, a brief note, between the speaker
and his spouse. The poem uses vocabulary and grammat-
ical choices to emphasize the material reality of the scene
it evokes. Set in a kitchen, the locus of women’s work in the
period in which it was written, it ties the feelings expressed
and evoked in the poem to the nuclear family and to the kind of
marital relationship on which this family was based. The vocabu-
lary choices in the poem depict the scene as being rich with
sensory experience and imply that the relationship between
the poem’s speaker and the person to whom the poem is
addressed is also a sensual one. The emotions expressed in
the poem are profound. At the same time, the mode of com-
munication and the “Reply” that Williams wrote later in the
persona of the spouse suggest remoteness and even isolation
or alienation between the “writer” of the note and its “reader.” »
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COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
Wow! I'm pretty impressed, if I do say so myself. This is good
stuff, and it’s interesting. With a little more work, it will be ready
to be my draft introduction. Then I'll just need to unfold the para-
graphs and figure out the conclusion and ... but I get ahead of myself.
Let’s get this paragraph tied up in ribbon, or baked, or built into the
best darn brick shed ever made.
Concluding the Introduction
I'm satisfied that this paragraph, as it presently stands, introduces
the topic and describes the argument I will undertake in the essay.
It suggests the evidence that I will use {focusing on “This Is Just To
Say” and including some evidence about the biographical, social,
and historical contexts for the poem). The first sentence introduces
the broad topic: Williams's poetry and marriage or relationships
with women. What this paragraph lacks, other than a little spit and
polish that will come later, is a sentence at the end that points to
how my argument contributes to our understanding of the mean-
ing or power of Williams’s poetry or of how it imitates life. In this
concluding sentence, I want to summarize the difference between
my findings and what a casual reader might think about the poem
(plums! icebox! delicious!). It is perhaps the second most important
sentence of your essay (next to your very first one), as it tells your
reader about the value of reading your essay. So let’s make it the
best that we can.
READING AND REREADING
The study of literature means a lot of reading; we know that.
But what is sometimes not made clear is that writing essays
about literature means rereading and rereading the central
text, the notes you've made about it, and any notes you have
from other sources. Rereading supports knowledge and under-
standing, but it also encourages new connections and deeper
thinking.
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
In order to come up with this sentence, I have to think hard. I'll
reread the paragraph, but I'll also go back to my original impressions
of the poem to see what sparked my imagination and my aesthetic
appreciation in the first place. Reviewing those notes, I find that
there are some ideas that I've moved beyond; I'm not feeling so
naughty, for instance, as I once did, overhearing part of a written
conversation between two people. I've come to see that as part of
the access to intimacy and the domestic scene that the poem gives
me. But I see that, in general, I was interested in the depiction of the
marital relationship, the feelings that the poem evoked, and the lan-
guage it uses in its short 12 lines to convey these things. If I reread
my draft first paragraph again, I see that I've been working on devel-
oping a finer-grained reading of those features of the poem, and
that’s what I'd like to communicate in my final sentence. So I want
to make sure the sentence refers to feelings, to marriage, and to the
language of the poem, and I also want it to refer to the learning I've
done in the work I've undertaken since my first reading of the poem.
Let’s try out a sentence: “This Is Just To Say” is a poignant
account of the potential for both intimacy and alienation in the nuclear
marriage. Now that’s pretty good; I like it. But it says nothing about
language. I have lots of specific things to say about language in the
body of the essay. But what's the best way I can convey that here?
Something about how the poet uses language to convey this poten-
tial for intimacy and alienation or about how he conveys it in such
a short space on the page, in so few words, might work. So let’s add
something about that: “This I's Just To Say,” in only 12 short lines and
a total of 33 words (including the title), manages to convey a poignant
account of the potential for both intimacy and alienation in the nuclear
marriage. How’s that? Like it? I'm good with it. Now let’s look at the
paragraph with that sentence added:
Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
The short poem “This Is Just To Say” is written as if it were
an act of communication, a brief note, between the speaker
and his spouse. The poem uses vocabulary and grammat-
ical choices to emphasize the material reality of the scene
it evokes. Set in a kitchen, the locus of women’s work in the
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COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
period in which it was written, it ties the feelings expressed
and evoked in the poem to the nuclear family and to the kind
of marital relationship on which this family was based. The
vocabulary choices in the poem depict the scene as being
rich with sensory experience and imply that the relation-
ship between the poem’s speaker and the person to whom
the poem is addressed is also a sensual one. The emotions
expressed in the poem are profound. At the same time, the
mode of communication and the “Reply” that Williams wrote
later in the persona of the spouse suggest remoteness and
even isolation or alienation between the “writer” of the note
and its “reader.” “This Is Just To Say,” in only 12 short lines
and a total of 33 words (including the title), manages to con-
vey a poignant account of the potential for both intimacy and
alienation in the nuclear marriage.
Looks good. I think it provides an informative and interesting open-
ing for my reader, one that shows them the value of reading the
whole essay and also gives them that all-important sense of having
learned something already, just by reading the paragraph. It may
still change as I work on the rest of the essay. But it’s not going to
get worse than this, and it provides a strong template to guide me
as I write the rest of the essay, in which everything will pertain to
one or other of these statements.
A VARTATION: AN ESSAY
WITHOUT SECONDARY SOURCES
We wrote our draft introduction in response to an assignment that
required us to use a full range of secondary sources, including refer-
ence works and critical materials. Often, students are asked to write
essays without evidence sources other than the work of literature.
This requirement is especially true for exams and midterm tests
in which you will often be given a piece of literature to analyze.
So let’s investigate how to write an essay about literature without
using secondary sources. You can use the same method to develop
an answer to an essay question on an exam or midterm, so it’s a
useful method to learn.
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
Let’s start by going back to the first chart I made in Chapter 6,
based on evidence gathered only from the poem itself and with the
idea of “marriage” exchanged for one of “domesticity” —because
the married relationship, while hinted at, is not delineated directly
in the text:
First Version of My Chart: Evidence from Poem
MATERIAL REALITY DOMESTICITY SENSUOUSNESS EMOTION
“the plums” 2 ! Title 0 have eaten” 1 Title
i “the icebox” 4 :“I/me,” “you” : “Ime,” “you”
E “breakfast” 8 “icebox” 4 ! : “Forgive me” 9
Sg “that” 3, “which” 5 : “breakfast” 8 cold” 12 ‘
i {deictics) i (domesticity)
i “you were probably :
| saving” 6-7 H
From this chart I can write subtopic sentences, as follows:
MATERIAL REALITY: In “This Is Just To Say,” William
Carlos Williams uses definite articles, concrete nouns, and
deictics (pointing words), which emphasize the material
reality of the scene evoked by the poem. The poem itself
reminds one of an everyday artefact—a brief note between
two intimates.
DOMESTICITY: The poem has a domestic setting and out-
lines a relationship within that setting between two people
living together, the one writing the note-like poem and the
one for whom it was written.
SENSUOUSNESS: The poem uses vivid, sensual language to
describe the plums and to imply a sensual or erotic dimen-
sion to the relationship between the poem’s speaker and the
person to whom the poem is addressed.
EMOTION: The title of the poem and the request to “Forgive
me” reinforce the impression that the relationship is emo-
tional as well as material and sensual.
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COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
From these sentences, I can prepare a draft introduction and thesis
statement for the little essay that I'm writing. I've changed a few
words and phrases, and I've also revised the order of the sentences
from the list above, so as to go from the broadest observation to
more particular ones.
“This Is Just To Say,” by William Carlos Williams, has a
domestic setting and outlines a relationship within that set-
ting between two people living together, the speaker of the
poem and the person to whom it is addressed. In it, the poet
uses definite articles, concrete nouns, and deictics (pointing
words), which emphasize the material reality of the scene
evoked by the poem. The poem itself is written in the form of
a note, from “me” to “you,” which suggests a brief, everyday
communication between intimates. “This Is Just To Say” uses
vivid, sensual language to describe the plums and to imply an
erotic dimension to the relationship. The title of the poem and
the request to “Forgive me” reinforce the impression that the
relationship is emotional as well as material and sensual.
Now I need that summary sentence at the end, the one that says
how my reading of the poem contributes to our understanding of
the meaning, power, or construction of the poem. Can you think of
one? How about something like this: In a few lines and a handful of
words, Williams creates an image of a rich and dynamic relationship
and a picture of domestic love that is equally material, sensual, and
emotional. That's fine. So here’s our paragraph:
“This Is Just To Say,” by William Carlos Williams, has a
domestic setting and outlines a relationship within that set-
ting between two people living together, the speaker of the
poem and the person to whom it is addressed. In it, the poet
uses definite articles, concrete nouns, and deictics (pointing
words), which emphasize the material reality of the scene
evoked by the poem. The poem itself is written in the form of
a note, from “me” to “you,” which suggests a brief, everyday
communication between intimates. “This Is Just To Say” uses
vivid, sensual language to describe the plums and to imply an
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
erotic dimension to the relationship. The title of the poem and
the request to “Forgive me” reinforce the impression that the
relationship is emotional as well as material and sensual. Ina
few lines and a handful of words, Williams creates an image
of a rich and dynamic relationship and a picture of domestic
love that is equally material, sensual, and emotional.
That’s a perfectly good introduction to a short essay on this poem.
We've introduced the topic in the first sentence (the poem and the
relationship it represents), we've indicated specific evidence that
will support each section of the argument, and we’ve made a state-
ment about why someone might be interested in reading our essay.
You'll have noticed that the kinds of conclusions about the
poem we've come to in each of these sample introductions are quite
different. In the first essay, the secondary sources allow us to come
to more definite conclusions about the sort of relationship portrayed
in the poem and, significantly, to slightly more skeptical conclu-
sions, ones that are more strongly related to the social and historical
moment of the poem. The other introduction discusses the poem
strictly in the terms that the poem offers within itself. The one essay
isn’t better than the other, but the thing to notice is that an essay
with secondary sources isn’t just longer than an essay without them:
it’s more complex, and it comes to conclusions that are broader and
more definitively related to the context within which the work of
literature was written and has been read.
TROUBLESHOOTING THE
INTRODUCTION AND
THESIS STATEMENT
Before leaving your introduction and thesis statement, read
it again, carefully (out loud?), and ask yourself the following
questions:
«Does it state your topic?
. Does it offer answers to the basic questions we ask about
literature?
112
COMPOSING YOUR ARGUMENT
What does it mean?
How does it work?
Why does it produce the effects it does?
Does it argue inductively, moving from the particular to
the general?
Are the statements logically connected?
Is each word in its place, and does each place have a
word to go in it?
CONCLUSION
Your thesis statement is the most important part of your essay. It tells
people why they should read your essay and what they will learn if
they do. To teach someone something, you have to be knowledgeable,
clear, and precise. So base your argument on evidence, make the
relationships between your statements logical, and use language that
exactly conveys what you want to say. Remember that your mission
is to explain some aspect or feature of a beautiful, moving, complex
piece of literature. If you work from evidence, reason inductively,
and write well, you will share with your reader the “aha!” moment
that you had when you first figured out something special about the
literature you are studying. That’s what it’s all about!
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Define and give an example of deductive reasoning.
2. Define and give an example of inductive reasoning.
What should the last sentence of your introduction
contain?
4. Canyou complete the following statement in a logical
and meaningful fashion: “Since the beginning of
time ...”?
5. What should you do if your introduction or thesis
statement just isn’t working?
113
CHAPTER EIGHT
Writing the
Body of the Essay
AFTER YOU’VE COLLECTED AND ORGANIZED YOUR EVIDENCE
and crafted your argument, writing the rest of the essay is easy. The
body paragraphs will each make a point contributing to your argu-
ment, and each will highlight the evidence that supports that point.
The subject for each body paragraph is provided by your subtopic
sentences. After you've roughed in these paragraphs, you can revise
to make sure that each one is complete and well structured, follows
neatly upon the previous one, and provides a transition to the next
one. Your conclusion will summarize what you have done and per-
haps point to the broader implications of your argument.
THE BODY PARAGRAPHS
The real beauty of basing your essay on carefully collected and
arranged evidence will now become apparent, as the body of your
essay unfolds from the hard work you've already done. Let’s return
to the introduction and thesis statement, broken now into sentences
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
that very closely resemble the subtopic sentences that we wrote to
summarize each of the sections of our evidence. These sentences
will provide our topics for each paragraph. (We’ll polish them up
for the final draft, so they aren’t exactly the same as the sentences
in the thesis statement, but, for now, we'll leave them as they are.)
After each sentence, I'll list the evidence from our chart that
belongs to it. I've used short forms here to refer to the evidence, but,
in your draft, you might want to cut and paste the evidence from
your files into place under the topic sentence of the paragraph you're
working on. That way, you will see clearly how the essay can take
shape when good evidence is combined with careful and imagina-
tive thinking.
Let’s start with the first sentence here, and list the bits of evi-
dence after it:
1. Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Biography: Williams’s marriage (reference works)
Nuclear family (social and historical contexts)
Marriage is central concern and Williams and women?
(criticism)
I think I will rearrange the evidence a bit so that it flows more logic-
ally from the first sentence. I want each sentence to follow upon the
previous one, so I want them to be linked by topic or idea. After my
rearrangement, the outline for my first paragraph looks like this:
1. Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Marriage is central concern (criticism)
. Biography: Williams’s marriage (reference works and
criticism)
. Williams and women (criticism)
. Nuclear family (social and historical contexts)
From this outline, and with the full texts of the evidence inserted
in the appropriate places, I can write up a paragraph such as the
following one:
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WRITING THE BODY OF THE ESSAY
Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Critics such as Charles Altieri, Theodora Graham, and Celia
Carlson all make note of these preoccupations. According
to Graham, “In the drama of their life together, one of the
most compelling stories he knew, Williams portrayed himself
as the tormented artist, repeatedly tempted to overthrow
his conventional life—represented by Flossie—and repeat-
edly retreating into the familiar and certain still center she
provided” (170). Williams and his wife were married for many
years (“William Carlos Williams”), although his unfaithful-
ness was a topic of emotional distress for them both (Graham).
The struggle of William Carlos Williams to define and enjoy
his marriage is representative of the broader struggle in
American society over the nature and structure of marriage
(A. Carlson; Brown).
So far, so good. I've been able to draw on my research to support
each point, and I've connected each sentence by topic with the pre-
vious one. I can do this for each paragraph, integrating the evidence
I've collected into sentences that articulate my own argument.
BE GOOD TO YOUR READER
Be kind to your reader and help them get the most out of your
essay with the least effort. Making sure each sentence follows
on from the one before is one way to help your reader follow
your train of thought: abrupt changes in topic are hard to keep
track of, and unfinished ideas are difficult to absorb. If each
of your paragraphs has a clear relationship to the main argu-
ment, the reader feels that they are gathering momentum and
accruing value in the course of reading your essay. Errors in
grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word choice slow the
reader and make them puzzle (unnecessarily) over what you
really mean. Remember, you are the teacher in your essay:
make your message clear, and make it worth the reader’s time
and effort.
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SECTION THREE: COMPOSITION
But I'm still missing something: a concluding sentence for the
paragraph. Other than the thesis statement, these concluding sen-
tences are the most important parts of your essay. They serve two
functions. The first is that they assert the relevance of these ideas
and this evidence to the overall argument. The second is that they
provide a transition to the next paragraph. If I remind myself of
the topic of the next paragraph and the argument of the essay as a
whole, it will be easier to write the concluding sentence for my first
body paragraph.
The argument of the essay as a whole, as I know quite well by
now, is that “This Is Just To Say” is an extraordinary and intense
description of marriage as a relationship between two people—a
relationship that has a social and material context and that is con-
ducted, at least in part, through language. I also know that the next
paragraph is going to begin with some version of the sentence “The
short poem ‘This Is Just To Say’ is written as if it were an act of
communication, a brief note, between the speaker and his spouse.”
After reviewing these two ideas, I realize I should summarize the
first body paragraph by indicating to my reader that I am going to
analyze a poem by Williams as a description of marriage crafted in
poetry. This sentence will also direct my reader’s attention toward
the concerns of the next paragraph. I'll try this sentence out as
my conclusion: “The description and expression of these struggles
in Williams's poetry is, however, a unique record of the personal
experience of marriage in twentieth-century America.” The draft
second paragraph now reads:
Marriage and his relationships with women in general are
central concerns in the poetry of William Carlos Williams.
Critics such as Charles Altieri, Theodora Graham, and Celia
Carlson all make note of these preoccupations. According to
Graham, “In the drama of their life together, one of the most
compelling stories he knew, Williams portrayed himself as the
tormented artist, repeatedly tempted to overthrow his conven-
tional life—represented by Flossie—and repeatedly retreating
into the familiar and certain still center she provided” (170).
Williams and his wife were married for many years (“William
Carlos Williams”), although his unfaithfulness was a topic
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WRITING THE BODY OF THE ESSAY
of emotional distress for them both (Graham). The struggle
of William Carlos Williams to define and enjoy his marriage
is representative of the broader struggle in American soci-
ety over the nature and structure of marriage {A. Carlson;
Brown). The description and expression of these struggles in
Williams's poetry is, however, a unique record of the personal
experience of marriage in twentieth-century America.
I'll do this for each of my body paragraphs. Beginning with the topic
sentence, I'll put each of the points from my evidence chart in place.
I'll draw on the actual evidence to fill in the sentences. I'll move
sentences around so that one leads to the next, and I'll devise a con-
cluding sentence that stipulates the relationship of this paragraph
to the argument as a whole and that leads to the next paragraph.
FEATURES OF STRONG PARAGRAPHS
Paragraphs are the building blocks of your essay. If you want to build
a strong essay, each block must be the right size and proportion, and
each must be as solid as the next one: bricks lined up, each one strong
and true, mortar firmly in place. A good rule is that paragraphs should
not be longer than a page of double-spaced text and not shorter than
a quarter of a page. If a paragraph is too long, see if it can be broken
into two paragraphs or edited down. If you end up removing a couple
of sentences, see if they can be integrated elsewhere, or let them go.
LETTING A GOOD IDEA GO
No one likes to see a good idea or a great sentence end up in the
trash. But sometimes we have to let ideas go. It’s not a bad thing:
in fact, it’s a sign that you're a good thinker (more great ideas
than can fit in one essay) and that you have a strong sense of
your argument (and can tell when something just isn’t going to
work). Still, it can be painful. Remember this: you had the idea
in the first place. It still belongs to you; it will always be part of
you. When the right time comes to use it, it will reappear. If it
never does, well, it is probably best left resting quietly by itself.
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Each paragraph is a mini-essay: each has an opening sentence
that states the topic of the paragraph, several (three or four) senten-
ces in the body, and a concluding sentence. If your paragraphs don’t
follow this format, revise them so that they do. Make sure that the
topic of the paragraph is clear and that the evidence presented in
the body sentences pertains to the topic and supports the part of
the argument you are dealing with in that paragraph. Confirm that
you have connected the evidence to the point you are making in
the paragraph; remember, you need to elaborate why this particular
evidence supports this part of your argument. Check your conclud-
ing sentence: does it consolidate the findings of the paragraph and
move us forward to the next one?
PARAGRAPH CHECKLIST
. Does it open with a sentence that conveys the para-
graph’s topic?
. Isic too long or too short?
. Are the points in the body of the paragraph supported by
evidence?
. Have you explained the connections between your evi-
dence and your paragraph’s main point?
- Does it conclude with a sentence that wraps up the
paragraph’s findings and moves us forward to the next
paragraph?
« Isit clear what the relationship of the paragraph is to
the argument as a whole?
WRITING THE CONCLUSION AND
REVISING THE INTRODUCTION
The Conclusion
Your conclusion is your chance to remind your readers what you want
them to take away with them after reading your essay. It’s appropriate
to summarize your argument here in much the same way as you did
in the introduction. It’s a good idea not to use exactly the same words;
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vary the sentence structure and vocabulary, and try using some quo-
tations from the poem or the criticism that crystallize your ideas and
argument. If you do this, you have concluded the essay adequately.
If you are more ambitious, the conclusion is the place to build
on the final sentence of your thesis paragraph, in which you've
stated the importance of your argument to broader concerns. Let’s
look at the sentences with which I concluded my two draft intro-
ductions in the last chapter. The first is for an essay in which I used
secondary sources, and it goes like this:
“This Is Just To Say,” in only 12 short lines and a total of 33
words (including the title), manages to convey a poignant
account of the potential for both intimacy and alienation in
the nuclear marriage.
The second is for an essay in which I did not use secondary sources,
and it goes like this:
In a few lines and a handful of words, Williams creates an
image of a rich and dynamic relationship and a picture of
domestic love that is equally material, sensual, and emotional.
In both cases, I note the brevity of the poem, how much it conveys
in so few words and lines, and the complex view of an intimate
domestic relationship that it provides. If I think hard about what
I've learned from writing this essay, I can push these observations a
little further. I can say that Williams shows us that poetry, because of
how it uses language and mediates between the personal and the social,
is capable of expressing complex, moving, and profound views of the
world around us. I like that, and I think it’s a valuable thing for my
reader to take away. Note that I haven’t proved that poetry does do
these things, so I don’t say that: but I have proved that it can, so I
say that. Also note that I've stayed on secure ground, supported still
by my evidence. I haven’t made generalizations about life, about the
human condition, about love, and I've stayed right away from “Since
the beginning of time” and “It is universally true.” But I have made
a generalization that is valuable for my reader, one that resonates
with the evidence and analysis I have presented in my essay.
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TAKING A BREAK
Before you read your draft essay from beginning to end again,
take a break. If you can, leave it alone for a day or two or even
longer. It’s important to “defamiliarize” yourself with what
you have written, so you can look at the essay objectively and
catch small errors or lapses. When we've been working hard on
something, we're often not able to see the difference between
what we mean to say and what we have said. It’s important for
your final version that you are able to see that difference and
make small changes to the essay.
Revising the Introduction
After you've taken a break, you can reread the essay from beginning
to end and make revisions to your introduction. These revisions will
probably not be major. They will strengthen the argument by alter-
ing the vocabulary, adding a phrase or two, and perhaps modifying
the sentence structure. You might want to add a couple of very brief
quotations from the literature, reference works, or criticism, if these
are good ways to make your argument clear. These revisions will be
based on what you learned as you wrote the body of the essay. Now
that you've come full circle, you're just about done!
CONCLUSION
Writing the body of the essay should not be too hard if you have lined
up evidence in categories, arranged the categories into an argumen-
tative structure, and written a strong thesis statement. It’s just a
matter of unfolding your thesis statement so that each sentence
there begins a paragraph, the substance of which is provided by the
evidence you have collected. The analytical reasons that a piece of
evidence supports the argumentative contention of the paragraph
are implicit in the choice you made to include that evidence in that
category. But remember this important advice: your sentences must
make those reasons explicit. Whenever you feel uncertain, return to
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WRITING THE BODY OF THE ESSAY
two home bases: 1) your research and the evidence it has provided
and 2) the thesis statement and the argument it articulates. You're
almost done the essay; don’t lose heart. If you've got this far and
are pleased with the results, the rest will be easy as pie (whatever
that means!).
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What is the source of your topic sentences for the body
paragraphs of your essay?
2. What are the qualities of a strong paragraph?
What length is too long or too short for a good paragraph?
How can you fix paragraphs that are too long or too short?
4. What does the conclusion of your essay offer your reader?
5. Why should you revise your thesis statement after writing
the rest of your essay, and how?
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Section Four
POLISH AND
PRESENTATION
CHAPTER NINE
Editing
and Proofreading Your Essay
YOU ARE READY TO DO THE FINAL EDITING AND PROOFREAD-
ing of your essay. This step is important, and you should always
leave yourself enough time to do it. You may also consider asking
a friend or classmate {one who you think knows the difference
between a comma splice and a sentence fragment!) to proofread
your essay and make suggestions for final changes.
Making sure your essay is letter perfect is important for several
reasons. The first is that you have worked hard on the essay, and you
should respect the results enough to ensure that it goes out wear-
ing its finest clothes, neat and clean and color coordinated (and it’s
going to a formal occasion, a wedding or a funeral, not out for coffee
with a friend). The second is that you must do everything you can
to make your reader’s experience a positive one, and this means
making sure that there aren’t errors that will slow them down. An
incomplete sentence makes your readers wonder where the rest of
the thought went; a misspelling makes them stop and have to figure
out what you were trying to say; the wrong word leaves your readers
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scratching their heads, wondering what it is you really mean. The
third reason is that you are likely to lose marks for errors in gram-
mar, punctuation, word choice, and spelling. I typically assign 10
per cent of the marks on an essay to these things, and I deduct one
mark for each error up to ten. That means that a well-organized
essay that uses evidence well and has a good argument can get a
worse mark than an essay that doesn’t do all those things quite as
well if the first essay loses ten marks for mechanical errors and the
second doesn’t lose any.
BEWARE THE SPELLCHECKER
English is full of homonyms, which are words that sound the
same but mean different things. To/two/too, they’re/their/
there, whale/wale/wail—all of these triplets sound identical,
but they are spelled differently. And they mean quite differ-
ent things. Recently, a student wrote the following sentence in
an essay for me about Much Ado About Nothing: “Claudio
rejects Hero viscously, even though they fell in love at first site,
because their society is very ridged.” Although “viscously” is
not exactly a homonym for “viciously,” both “site” and “sight”
and “ridged” and “rigid” are homonyms, or in the latter case
near enough to confuse us. The spellchecker accepted these
misspellings, as they are all real words in English. But the spell-
checker wasn’t right, and the student lost marks for spelling
anyway. So proofread carefully, and don’t trust your computer
with your grades!
CONVENTIONS OF ESSAY-WRITING STYLE
Diction
Diction means the manner in which something is expressed in words,
and it refers to the choice of words, the formality or lack thereof
of the sentences, and the degree to which the established rules of
grammar are observed. Usually, we want to fit the style of the lan-
guage to the ideas and purpose of the piece of writing. The essay you
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
have written is a formal argument, and it is logical and rational. The
genres that the essay most closely resembles are forensic rhetoric,
which tries to prove innocence or guilt in a legal proceeding, and
deliberative rhetoric, which tries to show that one social policy is
better than another. Both of these genres are also formal, logical,
and rational. Their style—accurate and rich vocabulary, powerful
and sometimes complex sentences, and an explicit organization of
the premises, evidence, and conclusions—suits their subject mat-
ter and their audience. The diction you use for an essay should be
formal, logical, and rational, and your choices in the essay should
suit the ideas you are presenting (which are strong, intelligent, and
complex) and the audience for which you are writing (your educated,
interested, experienced classmate, whether real or imaginary).
ASPHYXIATED?
When I was a grade-school student, I wrote a short autobio-
graphical piece for my creative writing class about a walk in the
woods. Init, I wrote that I was “asphyxiated” by the fragrance
of the pine trees. I had a vague sense that the word meant
“overcome,” generally through the airways, so I thought that it
would work. What I was missing was the fact that asphyxia-
tion is usually (no, always) negative in that it causes “asphyxia,”
which is loss of consciousness perhaps presaging death. “The
condition of suspended animation produced by a deficiency of
oxygen in the blood; suffocation,” according to the OED. Hmm.
Should have looked it up.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary you use in your essay is a feature of the diction
of your essay. If your diction is formal, logical, and rational, your
vocabulary should be as well. This means no slang or dialect
(words that belong to the modes of communication used by a social
or regional subset or particular culture, even if you are part of
that culture and it feels like the best and biggest one to you) and
no profanity, unless these are words that appear as part of your
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evidence. But the most important thing about the vocabulary that
you choose is that it be precise, which the OED defines as “[d]istin-
guished with precision from any other; identified with exactness;
particular, exact.” Why use precise words? They will best support
your argumentative aims. The wider the vocabulary you have at
your command, the more precise you can be. Use the dictionary to
double-check meanings of words about which you are uncertain.
Avoid words that are ambiguous, ones that have more than one pos-
sible meaning in the context of the sentence: what works in poetry
and song lyrics to express emotion and irony is not going to work in
your essay. Mean what you say, and say what you mean.
Connecting Words
Because your essay presents a logical argument that is supported
by evidence, you will want to use connecting words that establish
the relationship of one statement to another. These include com-
mon coordinating conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” “so,” and “or”;
subordinating conjunctions such as “because,” “although,” and
‘while”; and adverbs more common to formal diction such as “thus,”
‘therefore,” “however,” “moreover,” and “furthermore.” You can look
these up in the dictionary before you use them, and you should look
up any other words like this that you aren’t certain how to use. I'll
define these ones here and give examples:
< 5
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FORMAL DICTION
Formal diction doesn’t mean using fancy words for the sake
of using fancy words. Only use “therefore” instead of “and”
if you mean “therefore,” that is, if you mean that the second
observation you make is a consequence of the first. Remember
that you are trying to be as precise as possible, so use the right
word, whether it is long or short.
Because these words show the relationships between your ideas and
because those relationships are key to how strong and complex your
argument is, they are very important. When you are proofreading,
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
try and make sure that your conjunctions and adverbs are as precise
and appropriate as you can make them.
COMMON GRAMMATICAL ERRORS
Grammar is the framework and structure of language. It is not
just a set of rules any more than the rules of baseball are “just a
set of rules.” Grammar is what makes our language a language;
three strikes and you're out is one of the things that makes baseball
baseball and not dodge ball or cricket or polo. Words themselves
can’t communicate very much. If you know a few words in another
language, for instance, but you don’t know the grammar, you may
be able to get a beer in a bar or find out where the bus station is.
But you have been successful not just because you have said “beer”
or “bus station” in the language spoken where you are: you've also
indicated, by pointing, shrugging your shoulders, or making a
face, that you (the subject) want (the verb) a beer (the object of your
desire) or that you (the subject) would like (verb) to know where the bus
station is (objective phrase). You've expressed grammar with inter-
personal gestures and therefore turned a couple of words into acts
of communication.
Getting grammar right isn’t just a matter of having good man-
ners and evading the wrath of your who/whom-obsessed uncle; it’s
not the same as which fork to use or how to address your friends’
parents or what to wear to a wedding. Grammar is what lets you
become part of the occasion in the first place. Imagine that you
wrote “If your hamster won't eat its food, feed it to the cat”; you
wouldn’t be communicating what you want to say to me, unless
you wanted me to feed my hamster to my cat. If you wrote in your
essay that “Hamlet killed Laertes when he was at his wits’ end,” I
might ask you which of the men you thought was at his wits’ end.
If you wrote, “The speaker in ‘This Is Just To Say’ ate the plum
from the icebox, which was delicious and sweet,” I might wonder
why the speaker is eating iceboxes. In each case, you would have
used words that I recognize and understand, but you would not
have communicated successfully because you did not use grammar
correctly. It helps that I understand the words, but, without the cor-
rect grammar, I really can’t understand what you have to say, and I
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have to guess. You do not want your reader guessing what you are
trying to say: you want your reader awestruck by the brilliance and
persuasiveness of your argument.
The three examples above illustrate problems that are quite
common in student essays: misplaced modifiers (the hamster and
the icebox) and unclear pronoun reference (Hamlet and Laertes and
their wits). These mistakes will bedevil your essay, if you make them.
For the curious, here are the three sentences corrected:
If your hamster won't eat its food, feed that food to
your cat.
When Hamlet was at his wits’ end, he killed Laertes.
. The speaker in “This Is Just To Say” ate the plum, which
was delicious and sweet, from the icebox.
In my experience, students make other errors much more com-
monly. The most frequent problems are errors with apostrophes,
with demonstrative pronouns, with pronoun agreement, and with
verb tense.
Apostrophes
Apostrophes have two functions in our language. The first is to
indicate a contraction. Because you are using formal diction, you
should never use a contraction in your essay (unless it is part of the
evidence you are citing). Therefore “it’s” will never appear in any of
your essays, ever, ever, ever. “It’s” is the contracted form of “it is.” If
you can say “it is,” say “it is.” The second function that apostrophes
have is to indicate possession. These apostrophes will appear in
your essay. They will help attach an owner to a thing: “Williams's
verse” or “Hamlet’s sword” or “Shakespeare’s play.” Sometimes the
ownership is rather abstract, and you have to think about it (for
instance, “the play’s qualities” or “the verse’s rhyme scheme”), but
if you remember that the apostrophe hooks things together in a
relationship of ownership, then you won't go wrong.
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
WHERE DOES THE APOSTROPHE GO?
Sometimes, deciding where the apostrophe goes can be tricky.
Why? In English, we often indicate a plural form by adding
an “s"—so we might have one “dog” or many “dogs” that own
something, for example, “breakfast.” To figure out whether you
want “the dog’s breakfast” or “the dogs’ breakfast,” just switch
the bit indicating ownership to a phrase using “of ™:
the breakfast of the dog = the dog’s breakfast
the breakfast of the dogs = the dogs’ breakfast
Demonstrative Pronouns
Demonstrative pronouns are “this” and “that” and their plural
forms: “these” and “those.” They are pronouns because they replace
nouns that have previously been mentioned. They are demonstrative
because they point to a certain thing—they assume that the object
pointed to and the person pointing to it have particular positions
in space. We often use “this” in essay writing to refer to something
that we have just mentioned: we are pointing back to the thing in
the previous sentence. But sometimes we use “this” improperly, to
point back with a broad wave of the hand to a set of observations
that we wish to refer to. For example, let me repeat my prelimin-
ary introduction for the short essay outlined in Chapter Seven, the
essay written without secondary sources. Here I've replaced the
concluding sentence in order to demonstrate the improper use of
demonstrative pronouns:
“This Is Just To Say,” by William Carlos Williams, has a
domestic setting and outlines a relationship within that setting
between two people living together, the speaker of the poem
and the person to whom it is addressed. In it, the poet uses
definite articles, concrete nouns, and deictics (pointing words),
which emphasize the material reality of the scene evoked by
the poem. The poem itself is written in the form of a note, from
“me” to “you,” which suggests a brief, everyday communication
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between intimates. “This Is Just To Say” uses vivid sensual
language to describe the plums and to imply an erotic dimen-
sion to the relationship. The title of the poem and the request to
“Forgive me” reinforce the impression that the relationship is
emotional as well as material and sensual. This means that the
poem is an eloquent, but brief, depiction of domestic love in all
its aspects—material, sensual, and emotional.
The last sentence begins with “This,” which should refer to a
particular previous idea. But the position of the sentence—at the
conclusion of the introduction—and the rest of the sentence indi-
cate that I am actually referring to the whole prior argument, as it is
described in the paragraph from the beginning to the penultimate
sentence. In this context, “this” is not good enough. It struggles to
attach to something specific, something concrete. It can’t. It’s like
tethering a hot-air balloon to the ground with a piece of thread; the
balloon is too big, too powerful, and it will break the thread and
float away. I need to ask myself “This what?” and put the answer in
place: “This poem’s form, diction, and imagery make it an eloquent,
but brief, depiction of domestic love in all its aspects—material,
sensual, and emotional.”
The bottom line: use a demonstrative pronoun (“this” especially)
only when what it refers to is absolutely crystal clear. Ideally, use
“this,” “that,” “these,” and “those” only to refer to concrete nouns or
specific ideas. Better yet, restate that noun or idea after the demon-
strative pronoun, adding layers of meaning, if possible: “this sensual
and often sibilant language,” “these concrete and specific words,”
“those examples of Williams’s radical brevity and simplicity,” or
“that assertive request for forgiveness.” This (whoops!) These tips
will help you avoid confusing your reader or giving the impression
that you are making grand gestures toward vague but undefinable
truths, instead of making the exact, brilliant, perceptive, and reson-
ant point you want to make.
Pronoun Agreement
Pronouns must agree with the nouns they replace in number and
case. For example, if you wanted to replace the proper noun “Dave”
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
in the sentence “I gave the ball to Dave,” you would use the pronoun
“him.” Why? Well, you need a singular pronoun to get agreement in
number (Dave is only one guy, so you can’t use “them”). And you
need to use the objective case (Dave is not the subject of the sentence,
so you can’t use “he”; the word “Dave” is the indirect object of the
sentence—the one to whom you gave the ball). So you would write
“I gave the ball to him.” We all know this grammar, and we usu-
ally obey this rule when we speak. Sometimes, when we write, we
edit a noun (change it from singular to plural, for instance) without
changing the pronoun to correspond. Be very careful to align your
pronouns with your nouns. By the way, correcting errors in pro-
noun agreement is one reason among many to let your essay rest
for a while before you do the final proofreading; sometimes you will
not see the problem even though it’s staring you right in the face
because you think you've said what you meant to say. Giving your-
self a couple of days between finishing the final draft and handing
in the essay will help you read what you've actually written, instead
of seeing what you think you've written.
Verb Tense
Verb tenses place action relative to the present. Sometimes it can be
hard to choose a verb tense to discuss the matter with which essays
about literature are concerned. Why would we write about some-
thing that happens in a play that is 400 years old in the present
tense? Surely it is in the past. But it is a convention of literary criti-
cism to write about events in literature as if the work is present
(which it is, in that it is very much alive today) and as if the things
that happen in the work happen in the present (which they do, each
time we read about them). So we say, “Hamlet kills Polonius.” If
something happened before the beginning of the play or story, we
speak of it in the past tense: “Hamlet once loved Ophelia.” If we
are talking about two actions or episodes in a work of literature
and one happens before the other, we use where we are in our
discussion of the work as our “base” present tense and refer to an
incident that happened previous to this time using the past tense
and to one that will happen after this time using the future tense:
“Hamlet is remorseful when he kills Laertes, although he felt no
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such remorse when he killed the innocent Polonius” or “Hamlet is
not remorseful when he kills the innocent Polonius, although he
will feel remorse upon killing Laertes.”
COMMON ERRORS IN PUNCTUATION
AND SENTENCE STRUCTURE
Punctuation and sentence structure are complex systems that shape
our communications, and, as with grammar and word choice, they
are important to get right in your essay. The most common punctua-
tion and sentence structure problems in the thousand-odd student
essays that I've read are errors in the use of the semicolon, comma
splices, and sentence fragments.
MAIN (OR INDEPENDENT) AND SUBORDINATE
(OR DEPENDENT) CLAUSES
A clause has a subject and a verb that are tied together.
Independent clauses can stand alone as sentences, if you want
them to. A dependent clause is distinguished by a subordi-
nating conjunction, which introduces this dependent clause
as something that qualifies or describes the main part of the
sentence {the independent clause). “I go to work” is an inde-
pendent clause and could stand alone as a sentence. “Because
I go to work” is a dependent clause that is supposed to modify
an independent clause. “Because I go to work, I get paid” has
a dependent clause and an independent clause. Being able to
identify dependent and independent clauses is a big help when
it comes to proofreading your essay. (And yes, you can start a
sentence with “Because”!
Semicolons
The semicolon is one of the most bold and powerful of all marks of
punctuation, and it is an essential tool in writing the kinds of flex-
ible but firm sentences that characterize good essay writing. The
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
key thing to remember about a semicolon is that, unless it is being
used in a long list whose items contain commas, whatever comes
after or before it must be a fully independent clause that could stand
alone as a sentence. In other words, each of the word groups that
come before and after the semicolon has a subject, a verb, and any
objects necessary to complete a sentence. If you could separate—
right at the semicolon—the two halves of your sentence and come
up with two complete sentences without altering a word, then the
semicolon is safe and good. If you can’t divide the sentence into
two sentences, you need to add to one side or the other whatever
is necessary to make the clauses independent. For example, this
sentence uses the semicolon correctly: “Hamlet’s challenge is to get
revenge without compromising himself morally; to do so, he must
manipulate his enemies into a situation in which they deserve, mor-
ally, to be killed.” In contrast, here is a version of the same sentence
in which the semicolon is used improperly: “Hamlet’s challenge is
to get revenge without compromising himself morally; manipulate
his enemies into a situation in which they deserve, morally, to be
killed.” In the second example, the second half lacks a subject so
is not an independent clause. When you read over your essay, pay
special attention to your semicolons, and make sure they are safe
and secure, tucked between two independent clauses.
SEMICOLON OR COMMA?
PUNCTUATING LISTS
Semicolons are sometimes used in place of commas in long
lists. If the list items have internal commas, we need a stronger
punctuation mark to signal the end of an item. The three char-
acters—Laertes, Ophelia, and Hamlet—are the three items of
the main list in the following example:
Hamlet also presents us with three youthful charac-
ters in crisis: Laertes, who has a driving compulsion
to restore meaning to his life through blind, insist-
ent revenge for his father’s death; Ophelia, a lonely,
frightened, and susceptible creature on the brink
of madness; and Hamlet himself, the melancholy,
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bitter, and cynical young man who can be reflective
and thoughtful, indecisive and hesitant, or rash and
impulsive.
In this example, we use semicolons to separate the items in
the list, which are each modified by adjectives and adjectival
phrases, themselves separated by commas. Generally speaking,
if there are commas within the segments you want to itemize
in a list, use semicolons to separate the items.
Comma Splices
Unlike the semicolon, the comma is a weakling—or rather it is gen-
tle and sweet and not capable of muscling together two independent
clauses. A comma cannot attach two independent clauses. The test is
the reverse of the one for the semicolon; if both parts of the sentence
that are joined by a comma could stand independently as sentences,
then you have a comma splice—and you have made an error. Here is
an example of a comma splice: “Hamlet’s challenge is to get revenge
without compromising himself morally, to do so, he must manipu-
late his enemies into a situation in which they deserve, morally, to
be killed.” Either separate these spliced independent clauses into
two sentences (right at the first comma), or replace this comma with
a semicolon.
Sometimes you can correct a comma splice by inserting a con-
junction to join two independent clauses: “Hamlet is ordered by his
father’s ghost to kill Claudius, he tries to do so but fails” can be cor-
rected with the addition of the coordinating conjunction “but” and
a bit of other massaging: “Hamlet is ordered by his father’s ghost to
kill Claudius, but, when he tries to do so, he fails.” In this example
we've turned the second clause into a dependent clause that serves
as a modifier of the main clause.
Subordinating conjunctions can fix comma splices too. Look
at these sentences.
INCORRECT: Hamlet avenges his father’s death eventually,
this revenge costs him many more deaths.
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
CORRECT: Although Hamlet avenges his father’s death even-
tually, this revenge costs him many more deaths.
You might think that, if the incorrect sentence about Hamlet’s
revenge only had the word “however” after its first comma, every-
thing would be okay. Wrong! This is also a comma splice: “Hamlet
avenges his father’s death eventually, however, this revenge costs
him many more deaths.” The words “however,” “therefore,” and
“furthermore” (among others) do not have the power to join two
independent clauses together; they need a semicolon in front of
them if what follows is an independent clause (something that could
be a complete sentence on its own).
The important thing to remember is that if you have two
independent clauses, a comma cannot join them.
THE USE OF THE FIRST PERSON
Many teachers ask students not to use the first person (“I”) in
their essays. I don’t mind if my students do, but you should
check with your instructor. What I tell students is to remem-
ber that the essay is about what they think, not what they
believe. I also tell them that it is implicit that they are the ones
speaking in their essays, so they can present their hypotheses
and conclusions as statements that emphasize the ideas them-
selves—readers will understand, unless they are otherwise
informed, that the essay writer is the origin of those ideas. But
using the first person can be a good rhetorical strategy—for
instance, when you want to disagree with a critical common-
place or summarize what you are going to do in the essay. So
ask your teacher before assuming that you can’t use “1.”
Sentence Fragments
A sentence fragment or incomplete sentence is, as it sounds, a part
of a sentence that has been punctuated as if it were a complete
sentence. If your sentence lacks any of the essential components of
a sentence (a subject that does the action, a verb that says what the
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action is, and any necessary objects that complete the relationship
between the subject and the verb), then it is a fragment. Fragments
leave your reader wondering where the rest of the thought got to:
they are clifthangers. When you write fiction or film scripts, you
might like to have a cliffhanger of an ending, but, in essays, your
readers really like to know what happens.
Fragments tend to be short, and you can usually pick them out
of your essay that way. (If you have a “grammar checker” in your
word-processing program, it will usually identify fragments for you.
It doesn’t know how to fix them, however.) But there are certain
classes of words that are more likely than others to produce sen-
tence fragments in your work, and we will review two of them here:
subordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs.
SUBORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
Subordinating conjunctions join subordinate or dependent clauses
to main or independent clauses. They are very useful to the essay
writer because they help connect ideas to each other and interpreta-
tions to evidence. One of the most common is “because,” which
establishes a cause for an effect: “I ate the donuts because they were
there” or “We know that Hamlet is educated because, in Act 1 Scene
2, Claudius prohibits him from returning to school in Wittenberg.”
Another common subordinating conjunction is “although,” which
connects an effect with something that is not its cause: “I ate the
donuts although I was not hungry” or “Hamlet spurns Ophelia
although he has previously courted her.”
In each of the examples I have given, you can identify the
main and dependent clauses. The dependent clauses could not
stand alone as complete sentences. For this reason, students and
other writers are often cautioned not to start a sentence with a sub-
ordinating conjunction; it’s to prevent them from putting forward
a subordinate clause as a sentence. But you certainly can start a
sentence with a subordinating conjunction: just make sure that the
sentence includes an independent clause. For instance, you could
say “Although he has previously courted Ophelia, Hamlet spurns
her in Act 3 Scene 1” or “Because they were there, I ate the donuts.”
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
By the way, you can also start a sentence with “and” or “but,” which
are coordinating conjunctions; you just have to make sure you have
an independent clause in the sentence: “And, while you are at it,
check to see if the comma is in the right place.”
COORDINATING CONJUNCTIONS
AND SENTENCE FRAGMENTS
Sometimes, we create sentence fragments that begin with
coordinating conjunctions (and, but, for, nor, or, so, and
yet), conjunctions that, when used correctly, can begin an
independent or main clause. In order to be independent, the
clause must have a subject, a verb, and any necessary objects,
however it begins.
INCORRECT: | ate the donuts. But was not satisfied.
INCORRECT: Hamlet is not a man of violence. But finds him-
self able to dispatch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
These are fragments because they do not have subjects. To
make them independent clauses beginning with coordinating
conjunctions, we need to add the implied subjects, the ones
named in the original sentences (“I” and “Hamlet” or “he”).
CORRECT: I ate the donuts. But I was not satisfied.
CORRECT: Hamlet is not a man of violence. But he finds him-
self able to dispatch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Note that the following sentences also use “but” and commas
correctly to join together two independent clauses:
CORRECT: I ate the donuts, but I was not satisfied.
CORRECT: Hamlet is not a man of violence, but he finds him-
self able to dispatch Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
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You'll have noticed that one kind of sentence with a subordin-
ating conjunction between the two clauses doesn’t have a comma
in the middle, and the other does. How does that work? When
the main clause is first and the subordinate clause is second, you
don’t need a comma because the end of the main clause and the
beginning of the subordinate clause is indicated by the conjunc-
tion: when we hear “although,” we know a subordinate clause is
on its way. When you start the sentence with a subordinating con-
junction, you need the comma to indicate where the subordinate
clause stops and the main clause begins—the main clause is that
important.
HOWEVER...
“However” is the rock on which many sentences in essays
founder. It’s a very useful word; it introduces a piece of inter-
pretation that is supplementary to the main interpretation, an
insight or piece of evidence that serves to complicate and give
texture to the main argument. Good use of the word “how-
ever” is a marker of exactly the kind of essay you want to write:
one that acknowledges and embraces the complexity of the
work you are studying and of the interpretation it deserves.
However, “however” can cause problems for us all.
Briefly, “however” is actually two different words. One
is a conjunctive adverb (see main text), which shows a
relationship between two independent clauses, and it is gen-
erally treated in the ways I've described under “Conjunctive
Adverbs”: “There was no good reason for me to eat the donuts;
however, I did.”
The other way we use “however” is as an adverb of degree.
An adverb of degree describes an amount or intensity of what-
ever is meant by the verb: “I dislike donuts extremely but eat
them anyway.” Here's an example of “however” as an adverb
of degree: “However much I dislike donuts, I can’t resist eating
them and wish that Professor Randall wouldn’t leave a big box
in the mailroom every Tuesday morning.” However you put it,
donuts are a problem.
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CONJUNCTIVE ADVERBS
Adverbs typically describe verbs: they are about how things are
done. Conjunctive adverbs usually connect two main or independent
clauses and show relationship between the actions they represent.
They can show cause and effect (“Hamlet fears that Claudius will go
to heaven if he is killed at prayer; consequently, he is unable to take
action in this scene”), contrast (“Ophelia is emotional in the extreme;
in contrast, Gertrude is repressed, at least until confronted by Hamlet
in her closet”), or difference (“Polonius is a buffoon when alive; how-
ever, his death ironically puts him at the center of the action”), and
any number of other relationships between the two clauses.
When two clauses are joined by a conjunctive adverb, the
main clause ends with a semicolon. Unlike sentences that include
subordinating conjunctions, the order of the clauses connected by
conjunctive adverbs cannot be reversed: you can’t say “In contrast,
Gertrude is repressed, at least until confronted by Hamlet in her
closet; Ophelia is emotional in the extreme.”
While the clauses can’t be reversed, you can start a sentence
with a conjunctive adverb. When you do that successfully, the con-
junctive adverb links a set of statements made in the preceding
sentence or sentences with the substance of the sentence in which it
appears. We might say, for instance, “There was no good reason for
me to eat the donuts. However, I did.” Or, after a long and evidence-
rich account, over several paragraphs, of how Hamlet struggles to
control his passions with his reason, you might start a paragraph as
follows: “Consequently, Hamlet’s success leads to his failure to act:
his reason has mastered his passion, and without passion he cannot
fulfil his father’s requests.”
OUR BAD HABITS
Once I got an essay back from being peer reviewed by a journal.
The reviewers’ reports were good, but there was one comment
that has stuck with me: “the author has an unholy fondness
for semicolons.” The implications were rich and dire: in some
way, my relationship with semicolons was obsessive, heretical,
probably even erotic, and definitely neurotic. What to do? I've
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been to semicolon rehabilitation, and I go to regular meetings
of semicolons anonymous, but I still have to watch myself and
the key that rests so neatly under my right hand’s pinkie finger,
always tempting me to use it.
It is likely that you have your own small weaknesses in the
realm of punctuation; we all do. I hope that you are not as far
gone as I was about semicolons, and, if you are, that you get
help. But it is worth your while to look over your essays when
you get them back to see if there is a particular error that you
make more than others. If so, you can talk to your teacher or
a trusted peer, seek counsel at your school’s writing center (if
there is one), and look for information online. In this chapter,
I've tried to cover the errors I see most commonly, but we are
all individuals and will each have our own foibles when it
comes to writing.
CONCLUSION
Proofreading your essay carefully will pay off. You will prevent
yourself from losing marks that you don’t need to lose, and you
will ensure that your reader can grasp the argument you have to
offer fully and readily. When you feel more confident using com-
plex sentence forms and marks of punctuation that you don’t use
in everyday writing, you can write more powerfully and convey
more complex ideas. Proofreading is better done after leaving the
essay for a couple of days, as then you can be more certain that
you will read what you have written and not what you think you
have written. If it helps to read the essay out loud, so as to slow
yourself down and make sure you pay attention to every word, then
do so. If it helps to have someone else go over the essay and check
for errors, then find that someone—you can repay the favor, and
you will both get better grades! It’s easy to lose steam right at the
end of the process: but stick out the last bit of work, and proofread
as carefully as you can. And if you feel an “unholy fondness for
semicolons” (or any other punctuation mark) coming on, seek help
immediately.
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EDITING AND PROOFREADING YOUR ESSAY
REVIEW QUESTIONS
What kind of diction should you use in an essay?
Why is your spellchecker sometimes wrong?
How should you use a semicolon?
What is a comma splice?
What use can the dictionary be in polishing your essay
and producing the final version?
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CHAPTER TEN
Documenting
Your Sources
and Presenting Your Work
YOUR ESSAY IS JUST ABOUT READY TO HAND IN. THE LAST
things you need to do are 1) to make sure that you have documented
your sources correctly, and 2) to check that you are presenting your
essay in a way that either meets your instructor’s expectations or
is conventional to literary studies. In this chapter, we will review
the reasons for documenting sources and following the conventions
of presentation. We will also discuss how to handle the inclusion
of images in your essay or the presentation of the essay in a multi-
media format. I won't bother to give you specific instructions about
documentation, as your instructor will tell you which model they
want you to follow and direct you to resources to support your work.
But some general guidelines can be useful.
REASONS FOR DOCUMENTING SOURCES
In the broadest sense, we document our sources to identify, precisely,
how our essays fit with the history of scholarship on the topics with
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which they are concerned. When I write an essay, I want to show my
readers that I have reviewed thoroughly the existing intelligence on
the range of topics about which I am writing, including criticism
of the literature with which I am dealing, criticism of the author’s
works in general, assessments of the literary culture of the period,
and any other particular areas with which I am concerned, such
as gender relations, education, or a certain strain of philosophy. I
also want readers to be able to look at my sources if they want to—
perhaps they are curious about an area I treat only tangentially, or
perhaps they are concerned about the accuracy of my interpretation
of the source material. So I need to provide enough information for
them to locate the sources I have used. Journals and book publishers
normally require that information be presented in a standardized
format, which makes it easier for editors and readers to tell if the
information is complete and accurate.
For all essay writers, one of the reasons to document sources is
that readers will want to see clearly what is original to the author
of the essay and what comes from the work of others. For both
professional literary critics and students, plagiarism is a very ser-
ious charge that can result in severe setbacks and punishments.
Plagiarism is the use of another’s work, either directly or in close
approximation, without acknowledgment. It’s a form of theft: intel-
lectual property may be abstract, but it is nonetheless a real form of
property in national and international law. Intellectual property is
also an important cornerstone of any college or university because
these institutions exist primarily to generate ideas and disseminate
knowledge. Without intellectual property, we wouldn’t have much
art, many novels, or much of the technological innovation we enjoy;
we would lack these cultural “products” that are so important to our
societies, our economies, and our senses of ourselves.
In most universities and colleges, it is incumbent on the student
to know what plagiarism is: ignorance and accident are not excuses. In
most universities and colleges, there are significant penalties for being
found guilty of plagiarism. For your own safety, you should know what
plagiarism is and how to prevent it happening in your work.
If you are unable to document your sources without the essay
beginning to appear as a network of quotations and ideas from
other scholars, then you need to go back to your evidence, read
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through it again, organize it better, and craft an argument that
is supported by, but not created by, the sources you have used. I'll
repeat: there is no excuse for plagiarism, and there are no acci-
dental ways to commit it.
WHAT’S A PARAPHRASE?
A paraphrase is a rewording of something written or spoken by
someone else. You should paraphrase when you want to sum-
marize a much longer argument from your source. You should
not just change the order of words, or replace a few of them,
and call the result a paraphrase. You need to recast the idea in
your own mind, using your own words. When you could use a
quotation of reasonable length instead of a paraphrase, do so.
A quotation makes it clear to your reader what is your work
and what is not. Students are sometimes tempted to insert
paraphrases between quotations from the same source, so it
doesn’t look as if their essays are entirely composed of the work
of others. If that’s a problem you are having, paraphrasing is
not the solution. You have to go back to your evidence and
start the process of composing your own argument rather than
reproducing the arguments presented by your sources.
PLAGIARISM AND PRIDE
The single most powerful antidote to plagiarism is pride in
your own work. If you have worked hard, gathered evidence
carefully, organized it well, and constructed an argument that
is compelling, precise, and well supported, then you should be
glad to take ownership of your essay. Ensuring that you docu-
ment your sources is one way to show your pride in your work
and to distinguish this work as your own.
Documentation Practices
There are several different systems of documentation used in the
humanities. In English studies in North America, the most common
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is the Modern Language Association (MLA) system, which is codi-
fied in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, now in its
eighth edition (2016). Some journals also use a system based on The
Chicago Manual of Style, but most instructors will ask you to use the
MLA system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY OR LIST
OF “WORKS CITED”?
What is the difference? A bibliography includes all of the works
that you have consulted in preparing your essay. It may contain
works that you have read (in whole or in part) but that you have
not quoted or paraphrased or otherwise directly referred to in
the essay. A list of works cited is just that—a list of the works
that you have quoted, paraphrased, or directly referred to or
named in your essay. Check with your instructor for advice
about which to prepare for your essay.
Within each of these systems, there are various options. You
should check whether your instructor wants you to use footnotes or
endnotes or parenthetical citations (in which you put the author’s
name and the page number of your source in parentheses after the
quotation or paraphrase, and this “parenthetical” material refers
readers to a list of “Works Cited” for complete information about
your source). Some instructors are very firm about their preferences
in these matters. Others (me, for instance) simply ask that students
ensure that all quotations and paraphrases are attributed and that
all works cited are documented thoroughly and consistently.
There are online resources to help you with your documenta-
tion, but the best source is a printed version. There will be copies of
popular handbooks in your library, and there are style and grammar
guides that reproduce the basics of each system of documentation
along with helpful information about comma splices and the vir-
tues and vices of the semicolon. Consult your instructor for more
guidance on what resources to use to guide your documentation
practices.
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DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES AND PRESENTING YOUR WORK
PRESENTING YOUR WORK
Layout and Order
At its most basic, your essay’s format should allow for easy read-
ing and leave room for comments by your instructor on every page.
Unless your instructor gives you specific instructions otherwise,
you will be safe if you do the following:
use a 12-point font and double space;
format your document with margins of at least 1 inch (2.5 cm)
on all sides;
number your pages;
put your “Bibliography” or “Works Cited” on a separate page
at the end;
make sure your name, your instructor or teaching assistants
name, your student ID number, and the course number and
section are displayed at the top of the first page (you don’t
normally need a cover page, and this information can go at
the top left corner of the first page);
staple or fasten the whole together with a paper clip, unless
you are delivering it electronically. (Don’t send paper clips
through the Internet! I'm kidding.)
TITLES
Titles of books and book-length works, such as long poems,
should be underlined or italicized. Titles of poems and short
stories should be placed in quotation marks, without any
underlining or italicization. If you are unsure whether the title
of a long poem or a short play should be italicized or enclosed
in quotation marks, ask your instructor or, in a pinch, follow
the practice of a reputable critical source or the advice given
in the MLA Handbook.
Some teachers will give you additional guidelines or rules they
would like you to follow. I prefer not to have the justification on
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both sides of the page, for example, as I find it harder to read. But,
as I receive my students’ essays electronically, it’s not hard for me
to adjust this feature myself. If your teacher gives you guidelines,
follow them; if not, the list above is sufficient.
Hlustrations
You may want to include illustrations in your essay. Doing so is easy
with modern word-processing and image-manipulation computer
programs. There are two important things to remember.
First, an image that looks good on the Internet will not neces-
sarily look good on the printed page. Our computer screens are
relatively low resolution: they display only about 72 pixels per inch.
Printers print a lot more dots per inch than computer screens
display. If the image you have chosen is not printing clearly, this
difference is probably the reason. For your purposes, you want an
image that is at least 150 dots or pixels per inch. You can usually
resize the image with image-manipulating software.
ELECTRONIC FILE FORMATS
There are lots of different forms in which to save electronic
files. Some of these are universally readable, and some are not.
As a rule, text files saved in “rich text format” can be read by
all computers and edited by the reader. “PDF” files can also
be read by all computers, but most teachers like to write in
the files, and most won't have the software necessary to edit a
PDF. If you are creating a multimedia essay, ask your instructor
what form to deliver the file in. Getting it right the first time
will save everyone time and anxiety.
Second, images on the Internet usually belong to someone. You
can usually use an image from the Internet for educational purposes
(and not for formal publication or distribution) if you give credit to
the originator. It is sometimes hard to track down the source for an
image on the Internet, however, as digital media is readily copied
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DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES AND PRESENTING YOUR WORK
from site to site. Do the best you can to find out as much as you can
about the image: if it is a painting, for example, see if you can find
out the artist, the date, and the present location of the work. Include
the information you have about the work in a caption, and include
the information about where you got the image in your list of works
cited. In the handbook that you use or on the Internet itself, there
should be information about how to document an image in your list
of works cited; otherwise, you can ask your teacher.
MULTIMEDIA AND THE LITERARY ESSAY
I have had students submit essays produced using slideware pro-
grams or as web pages or websites. When essays are presented in
these forms, they use visual composition to help construct the argu-
ment and visual images as evidence in support of the argument.
Multimedia essay writing can be really enjoyable, as it allows you
to use your creative capacities in ways not normally encouraged by
the essay form. Still, it’s not just a matter of adding some sparkle
and glitz. There are effective ways of using multimedia tools in the
literary essay, and it’s important that you think through what will
work to support your success.
SLIDEWARE
Slideware, which you probably know by the brand name of its
most popular form, is as ubiquitous in academia as it is in
business and government. It’s easy to use badly but not hard
to use well. The key is to use it thoughtfully and to avoid
the ready-made templates that, according to Edward Tufte,
“weaken verbal and spatial reasoning and almost always cor-
rupt statistical analysis” (Tufte 3). For more about the perils of
PowerPoint, see Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint™:
Pitching Out Corrupts Within.
If you are presenting your essay using multimedia tools, you
should be conscious of using principles and components of design
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to craft your work. There are many good tutorials on visual compos-
ition on the Internet and many good basic books in the library and
in bookstores. I won't review those here for you; if you are given the
option of submitting a multimedia essay, your teacher will go over
basic use of composition, color, form, space, pattern, proportion,
and contrast in order to create a pleasing product. They will also
help you work with the technology that you are using to make the
best use of your ideas and take advantage of the particular media
you are working with: desktop publishing, slideware, and hypertext
mark-up language (HTML, the basic code of web pages) all have
strengths and weaknesses, and you should be aware of them as you
work your way through your project.
Basic design knowledge is not enough, however, to “write”
effectively in multimedia form. Even a glance through a typical
magazine spread will show you how carefully illustrations and com-
position are integrated with the text and how they contribute to the
power and meaning of the words on the page. Visual communica-
tion is different from verbal communication, and the combination
of the two is different still. Consistent use of composition, color, and
illustration placement can contribute to the structure of your multi-
media essay: in effect, you can use design elements to construct a
visual grammar, so your design can contribute to how your essay
gets its message across and to how much pleasure, knowledge, and
satisfaction you can give your reader—or should we say viewer?
In addition to compositional features, multimedia allows you to
add illustrations, as we've discussed above. Illustrations in a multi-
media essay should not be used simply as decoration. Illustrations
in essays must have some relationship to the text to which they
correspond. Basically, we can divide these relationships into three
types: exemplary, complementary, and supplementary.
Exemplary Illustrations
Exemplary illustrations give examples of things that you are writ-
ing about in the essay. For example, for our essay on William Carlos
Williams’s poem “This Is Just To Say,” we might want to add a pic-
ture of an icebox as an illustration. The effect on the reader would
be to make concrete and visual the idea of the icebox in the poem,
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DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES AND PRESENTING YOUR WORK
which might support two aspects of our argument: one, the mater-
iality of the scene, and two, the era in which the poem is set.
The problem with exemplary illustrations lies in the fact that
visual images are specific and exclusive: that is, the icebox in the
picture is a certain kind of icebox, and the time it represents is a
specific time. It’s easier to see this point with a different example: if
I write the word “dog,” that might conjure an image of a certain sort
of dog in your mind, but possibly not. And even if it did, you would
know that other readers might well think of a different sort of dog
or about several sorts. But a picture is a picture of a dog (a small or
a big dog, a border collie or a mutt, a fierce or gentle-looking dog,
and so on). It does not suggest “dog” in general. So you should real-
ize that, when you use exemplary illustrations, you might well be
limiting the imagination and thinking of your reader more than is
useful for your argument. For the purposes of your argument, for
example, it doesn’t matter if the icebox is small or large, painted or
not. But the picture will specify those characteristics, and it will
shape your reader’s understanding of your point.
Complementary Illustrations
Complementary illustrations echo the verbal statement or state-
ments they accompany. For example, if you analyzed a scene from
Hamlet in an essay, you might illustrate that section of your essay
with a picture of the scene. You might especially want to choose
a picture that emphasizes aspects that you are discussing in the
verbal part of the essay. Complementary illustrations can reinforce
your point and offer your reader more evidence to support your
argument.
The danger of using complementary illustrations is twofold.
First, they can contradict your verbal analysis—for example, they
might show a choice by an actor or a director for Hamlet's behavior
that is not consistent with how you understand the play or the scene
in question. Second, they might serve to be more exemplary than
complementary: an image of a production of Hamlet is an image of
a specific production that happened in a particular place, at one
time, and featured certain actors. If the specificity of the image
is such that it encourages the reader to consider concrete issues of
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staging or of fashions in props and costumes, then you might have
undermined the degree to which the illustration can enhance your
argument (unless, of course, your essay concerns the staging, props,
or costumes used in a particular period or production).
Supplementary Illustrations
Supplementary illustrations extend the argument outside the
boundaries within which the verbal argument is made. Let’s say
you were analyzing a landscape poem and were focused on the ways
in which the poet creates the illusion of infinite space before the
viewer. In searching for illustrations, you are inspired: an artist’s
painting of what they believe outer space to look like has many
features in common with the poem you have analyzed. You choose
to illustrate the part of your argument that concerns the illusion of
infinite space with this painting of outer space.
If you are successful, your reader will see a correspond-
ence between the two and will understand the relevance of your
argument to arguments beyond the question of how we imagine
landscape and connect your argument, with the help of the illus-
tration, to questions of how we imagine knowing what is unknown
and conceptualizing that which is infinite and unbounded. If you
are unsuccessful (that is, if you haven’t clearly articulated the argu-
ment or if you haven’t hinted at the broader questions to which your
argument might apply), then your reader might wonder what the
connection is between the text and the illustration—and be dis-
tracted by the wondering.
When you compose a multimedia essay, you need to take care to use
the components and principles of design to support the structure
and sequence of your essay and its argument. When you choose
illustrations for a multimedia essay, you should assess what you
are doing with the illustration in terms of the argument: Are you
offering an example? Are you reflecting the argument? Or are you
extending it to realms outside those with which you deal directly in
the essay? Assessing the function of your design and of your image
choices will help you use multimedia tools to make an even more
effective argument than you otherwise could.
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LAST-MINUTE CHECKS
Before handing in your essay, you should do one final reading of it.
In particular, you should check the following:
. Is the word or page count close to what the assignment called
for?
Have you spelled the instructor’s name correctly and included
the name of the teaching assistant, if there is one?
. Is everything absolutely perfect in the first paragraph? Is the
first sentence the best sentence you have ever written?
Have you numbered your pages?
Have you attached the “Works Cited” or “Bibliography”?
. If you're happy with the essay and you have answered “yes” to
all these questions, then it’s time to hand it in.
TALKING TO YOUR INSTRUCTOR
ABOUT YOUR GRADE
Sometimes, you will be mystified by your grade. If you are mys-
tified as to why it is so high, you are unlikely to be inspired to
approach your instructor, although finding out exactly what
you did right can be very useful. But if you are disappointed
in your grade and don’t understand why it is as low as it is,
you should definitely talk to your teacher. Approach them after
class or during their office hours to make an appointment, or
send a note by email. Remember that your relationship with
your instructor is professional: address them by title (“doctor”
or “professor,” usually), and sign your full name to any written
communication (attaching your student number is often helpful
too). Make an appointment to see them, and ask for help under-
standing where you lost marks. It’s part of our job to grade, and
it’s also part of our job to talk to students about their grades.
So don’t be shy. But don’t be defensive either; it’s part of your
job to learn at university, so you shouldn't expect to have all
the answers already. Remember, your professor will need time
to recall the details of your paper, so be courteous and allow for
this preparation by making an appointment.
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SECTION FOUR: POLISH AND PRESENTATION
CONCLUSION
Documenting the sources of your work is an essential obligation in
an essay. It’s absolutely vital that you distinguish between what is
original to your thinking and what belongs to someone else. Take
pride in your work, and document your sources thoroughly and
carefully. In addition to helping you produce a better essay, docu-
menting sources supports the mission of the university, which is
built on the idea that people’s thoughts and scholarly contributions
are valuable and important and should be recognized as such. By
recognizing the contributions of others, you imply that we should
have respect for your work and give you the credit it deserves. You
also imply that you are ready to take on the responsibilities that
come with being part of the university community, along with the
many privileges it offers.
Present your essay in the best possible light by following the
guidelines given to you by your instructor or the conventions out-
lined here. If you include illustrations, make sure to report their
sources, and use versions that will print well. If you work in multi-
media, take care to be conscious of the ways in which your visual
choices affect your argument: they can make it stronger, more
vibrant, and more compelling, but they can also undermine it.
Produce your essay as a professional. Spell people’s names cor-
rectly, and identify yourself fully. Show your pride in your work in
every choice you make about its presentation. And have confidence
in approaching your instructor if you do not understand why you
received the grade that you have. Grading essays is objective, and
your teacher has measured particular things in your essay, but they
might be able to explain them better. And, of course, your teacher
is human and may well have made a mistake that they would like
to correct. If you are courteous and composed, you will likely have
a good conversation that will strengthen your understanding of the
essay form and enhance your essay-writing performance next time.
So don’t be afraid to approach your instructor; if you do so with
respect and maturity, you are bound to get good results.
158
DOCUMENTING YOUR SOURCES AND PRESENTING YOUR WORK
REVIEW QUESTIONS
What is plagiarism?
2. When should you use paraphrases, and when should you
use quotations?
3. Canyou list some of the features of the conventional
presentation of an essay?
4. When do you use quotation marks and when do you use
italics to indicate a title?
5. What are the three main relationships between text and
image in a multimedia essay?
159
Section Five
CONCLUSION
AND
REVIEW
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Process
of Essay Writing —A Summary
THE ESSAY-WRITING PROCESS THAT I HAVE DESCRIBED IN THE
previous ten chapters is based on evidence and designed to help you
craft a compelling and clear argument about how a work of litera-
ture instructs, delights, and imitates life. Here is a summary of the
process. You can use it to review what you have learned in the book
and to check that you have followed all the necessary steps.
COLLECTING EVIDENCE (CHAPTERS 2-5)
At a minimum, your evidence will come from
. your first impressions, and
. your close reading of the text you are writing about.
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SECTION FIVE: CONCLUSION AND REVIEW
In addition, you may collect evidence from the following sources:
other works by the same author or by authors associated with
the one on whom you are focusing;
reference works such as scholarly editions, biographies,
dictionaries, and encyclopedias;
works about the social and historical contexts for the
literature you are studying; and
critical essays and books.
All of your evidence should be
carefully transcribed, preferably rekeyed rather than cut and
pasted into a text file;
precisely documented; and
labeled with terms that remind you of the significance you
feel the evidence has.
CATEGORIZING EVIDENCE (CHAPTER 6)
Once you have completed your research, you should
reread all your evidence,
review the labels you have assigned to it,
arrange the evidence in categories,
reduce the number of categories (usually to three, four, or five,
depending on the length and complexity of your essay), and
compose your evidence in a chart that organizes the evidence
by category and by source.
Each category should have several pieces of evidence in it, but it is
not necessary to have evidence from all sources in each category.
164
THE PROCESS OF ESSAY WRITING—A SUMMARY
WRITING YOUR THESIS STATEMENT (CHAPTER 7)
To compose your thesis statement,
read the evidence in each of your categories,
compose a sentence that reflects the evidence for each
category,
arrange these sentences so that they are linked logically,
compose an opening sentence that introduces the topic and
that is related to all of the categories, and
compose a concluding sentence that sums up the argument
and points to the relevance of your argument to broader
questions than the ones you will address directly in your
essay.
TROUBLESHOOTING THE THESIS STATEMENT (CHAPTER 7)
Before leaving your introduction and thesis statement, read it again
carefully, and ask yourself the following questions:
Does it state your topic?
Does it offer answers to the basic questions we ask about
literature?
. What does it mean?
How does it work?
. Why does it produce the effects it does?
Does it argue inductively, moving from the particular to the
general?
. Are the statements logically connected?
Is each word in its place, and does each place have a word to
go in it?
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SECTION FIVE: CONCLUSION AND REVIEW
WRITING THE BODY PARAGRAPHS (CHAPTER 8)
Each of your body paragraphs should begin with a variation of the
corresponding sentence in your thesis statement. In each paragraph,
you should detail that section of the argument, using the evidence
from that category to support your claims.
After writing the body of the essay, review your paragraphs and
ensure that each
opens with a sentence that conveys the paragraph’s topic,
is not too long (a page or more) or too short (a quarter of a
page or less),
includes evidence to support each point,
concludes with a sentence that wraps up the paragraph’s
findings and moves us forward to the next paragraph, and
has a clear relationship to the argument as a whole.
CONCLUDING YOUR ESSAY (CHAPTER 8)
Your conclusion
should remind readers of what you want them to take away
with them upon reading your essay,
should summarize your argument, and
can develop the ideas in the final sentence of your thesis
paragraph in which you've stated the relevance of your
argument to broader concerns we have.
PROOFREADING (CHAPTER 9)
Proofread your essay carefully (or share with a classmate, and
proofread each other’s essays). Check especially for the following
Common errors:
homonyms mixed up,
improperly used connecting words,
. vague or ambiguous use of demonstrative pronouns,
166
THE PROCESS OF ESSAY WRITING—A SUMMARY
improperly used apostrophes,
problems with pronoun agreement,
problems with verb tense,
semicolon errors,
comma splices, and
sentence fragments, especially those caused by improper
use and punctuation of subordinating conjunctions and
conjunctive adverbs.
DOCUMENTATION AND PRESENTATION (CHAPTER 10)
It is essential that you document your sources:
include all necessary information about the source;
quote rather than paraphrase, where possible;
include sources and information about any pictures that you
use; and
. record all your sources in either the “Works Cited” or the
“Bibliography” of your essay.
Present your work according to the instructions you receive about
page or word count, . “Works Cited” or “Bibliography,”
documentation style, and
margins and font size.
If you do not receive instructions otherwise, follow these
guidelines:
. use 12-point font and at least 1-inch margins;
. put your name, your student ID, your instructor’s name
(correctly spelled), and the course number on the first page,
along with your TA’s name if relevant;
. number your pages; and
. attach a list of “Works Cited.”
167
SECTION FIVE: CONCLUSION AND REVIEW
CONCLUSION
I said at the beginning of this book that any literate, hard-working
student can write an essay that earns an A-level grade. I hope that
you can use the advice and processes described in this book to do
just that. If you already write A-level essays, then you will have
learned more about how you do that, so you will be able to work
confidently with more advanced kinds of evidence and in the pro-
duction of longer and more complex forms of the essay.
What I most hope is that the work you will do in following the
guidelines in this book will bring you those thrilling moments of
insight and flashes of truth and beauty that are the reward of hard
work on the foundations of good essays. Since the beginning of time
.. NO, that is not allowed! But let me offer a generalization about
literature here. Literature is connected to the best things about us
humans—our abilities to read and write and communicate, our
emotional intensity, our complex psychologies, and our phenom-
enal capacities to remember, reflect, regret, and hope. Improving
our individual and collective abilities to understand literature and
how it affects us and to communicate with each other about those
things is a good way to use and share the gifts we have been given.
Happy writing. I'll be thinking of you.
168
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE
Using
Reference Works
(Ch. 3)
ASSIGNMENT: Write a three- to five-page essay (750-1250 words)
about “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, using the
poem and any or all of the following reference works: a dictionary
(especially the OED), an encyclopedia, a biography of Williams, and
a scholarly edition (annotations and introduction). You may wish
to review your notes from class and from your close reading of the
poem, and look over your responses to the “Guiding Questions”
listed on p. 22 of Writing Essays About Literature.
To compose this essay, I start by rereading the poem and
reviewing my notes, my answers to the guiding questions (p. 22), and
the conclusions I came to (see pp. 33). The conclusion I would like to
explore further is that the poem is about relationships between people
and how these relationships are shaped by the use of language; I want
to find out more about how that happens in the poem. I planned to
use the OED, an encyclopedia (likely Wikipedia), and a scholarly edi-
tion of the poem to do my research. I also used a biography, in part
169
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE
because Internet searching suggested to me that there was something
useful I might want to know about WCW’s marriage.
You'll see when you read the sample essay I've composed that
I rely on grammatical features as evidence of how the poem works.
I know that you might not know what a demonstrative pronoun
is, or what the present perfect verb tense looks like. But you are
able to ask your instructor (who is something of an expert in these
questions), look up words in the dictionary, and even search on the
Internet. I asked the Internet, for instance, “I have eaten what verb
tense” and it responded, “present perfect.” How does it know so
much!?
SEARCHING THE INTERNET
FOR IDEAS
The Internet is full of great information about everything.
You can use the Internet to get ideas and make connections.
Internet search results themselves aren’t usually credible
sources to use in your essay, but they may lead to good sources.
For this essay, for instance, I searched for “William Carlos
Williams infidelity” which led me to the biography, which is
a credible source.
For this kind of essay (a typical essay assigned in literature and writ-
ing classes at every level of secondary and postsecondary education),
I hope to have an opening paragraph that states the topic and out-
lines the argument of the essay, three or four body paragraphs, and
a conclusion. Each body paragraph should have a topic, and there
should be four or five key points made in each paragraph that are
a) supported by evidence and b) about that topic. If I gather and
arrange my evidence well, then all I have to do is write it up as the
story of that evidence. The conclusion at the least will sum up the
argument, and at the most point toward further implications or
further pathways for research.
dk
170
USING REFERENCE WORKS (CH. 3)
Katherine Acheson (SN 084310962)
January 20, 2020
The Language of Intimacy in
W. C. Williams’s “This Is Just To Say”
Even though it is only 28 words long, “This Is Just To Say”
by William Carlos Williams vividly conveys the nature of the
relationship between the speaker or writer of the poem and its
listener or reader. That relationship is everyday and down-to-
earth; it is between people who have a history together; it is
sensual and intimate. These qualities are conveyed through the
choices the poet makes of words and grammatical features. The
vocabulary reinforces the impression of the sensory, material,
and experiential world. The use of the definite article (“the”),
demonstrative pronouns (“This”), relative pronouns (“that” and
“which”), and personal pronouns (“I” and “you”) imply a concrete
reality which is shared by, and private to, the writer and the
reader. The range of verb tenses suggests a shared history, a
common present, and the likelihood of a future together. Finally,
the request for forgiveness in the final stanza is a mark of complex
interpersonal and emotional relations. “This Is Just To Say”
makes clear that poetry’s value is not restricted to its intellectual
or aesthetic powers—it can also represent some of the many ways
in which language shapes and reshapes the relationships we have
with others in our worlds.
The choice of words in the poem conveys a sense of a material,
» <« everyday reality. The nouns (“plums,” “icebox,” and “breakfast,”
171
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE
for example) are all concrete things, rather than abstract concepts.
The poem also uses small functional words that are not nouns
to build the perception we have of an actual space in which real
people interact. “The” is a definite article (“the, A.I.”), meaning
that it points to an individual or particular thing, rather than to
the concept or generic form of the thing. “The plums” (1. 2) are
specific, physical plums, not metaphors or ideas, and they were
in “the icebox” (l. 4), which is also an object with functional
properties for the people who own it. The poem uses relative
pronouns (“that” and “which”) which point to specific things
and distinguish them from other examples of their kind, or from
abstract conceptions of the thing (“that, A.I.a.1” and “which,
1.4.111.7"7). “This” in the title is a demonstrative pronoun; it points
from the speaker to the poem itself, at least in its own fiction as a
“1” note between two people (“this, 1.1.2”). Finally, “I” and “you” are
pronouns whose meaning is relative to who is doing the speaking.
As readers of the poem, we infer that “I” and “you” know who
each other are and that there is no ambiguity for them in the
communication: the conversation is private to the two of them.
These words, the meanings of which we usually take for granted
and which we often overlook when we think about the vocabulary
of a piece of literature, contribute to the way in which the poem
evokes an actual space in which people go about their daily lives
and the relationships they have in that space.
The vocabulary of the poem also suggests that sensual
and possibly sexual pleasures are routinely shared between the
172
USING REFERENCE WORKS (CH. 3)
two people. “Plums” are sweet, rich, and velvety; they are also
red or purple, both colors associated with the human body and
especially with intimate or inner parts (“plum 11.7”). The plums
are “delicious,” “so sweet,” and “so cold”; the experience of eating
them is a sensual pleasure. If the language suggests sensuality,
the fact that the speaker enjoyed the plums by themself suggests
that they denied those pleasures to the reader or listener—
pleasures the reader or listener seems to have planned on, as they
were “probably/saving [the plums]/for breakfast” (Il. 6-8). The
speaker’s demand, “Forgive me” (1. 9), can be seen in this context
as a slightly dramatic overstatement of transgression and remorse,
designed both to acknowledge the sin and to deflect or minimize
its punishment. The sexual nuances of the description of eating
the plums suggests both physical and emotional intimacy
between the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader.
The intimacy of “I” to “you” is reinforced by the use of verbs
in the poem. The use of the present perfect tense, “I have eaten,”
which usually describes an action recently completed, initiates a
timeline for the poem’s events. Within the timeline, we recognize
the time immediately before the speaker ate the plums, when the
decision was made, and the time immediately after, when they
9 are experienced as “delicious,” “so sweetfand so cold” (Il. 10-12).
But there is also the future that didn’t happen, signaled by the
use of the conditional “were probably/saving” (ll. 6-7) in which the
recipient of the poem’s wishes were fulfilled, and the future that
will happen, in which the recipient does—or does not—accede
173
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE
to the demand to “Forgive me” (1. 9). The verbs describe people
who live together and have shared history in which their actions
impact each other, and their preferences and potential reactions
are known to each other.
When it was published in Williams’s Collected Poems, “This
Is Just To Say” was annotated with a footnote in which readers
found another poem, called “Reply.” While both poems are by
Williams, “Reply” is written in the voice of the recipient of “This
Is Just to Say” and is signed “Love. Floss,” the familiar name of
Williams’s wife Florence (“William Carlos Williams”):
“Reply”
(crumped on her desk)
Dear Bill: I've made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you'll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.
On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea
174
USING REFERENCE WORKS (CH. 3)
Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
1 didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—
See you later. Love. Floss.
Please switch off the telephone.
Like “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” refers to the prosaic, everyday
life of a married couple whose long story is made of many short
sentences. But unlike “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” is entirely
about the material world and the basic needs of the humans
within it. The relationship it describes is longstanding and good-
humored, even faithful and loving, but it is neither sensual nor
sexual. Most importantly, “Reply” implicitly refuses forgiveness
by rejecting the dimension of the marital relationship in which
sin or betrayal can happen. According to his biographer, Herbert
Liebowitz, Williams was routinely unfaithful to his wife, whom
he often regarded with contempt and even derision (Liebowitz,
Ch. 5). With the additional context provided by the juxtaposition
of the two poems in the Collected Poems, we can see that the
sensual austerity of “Reply” and the request for forgiveness in
“This Is Just To Say” together suggest a stand-off, an unresolved
tension within the marriage of the two speakers/writers. Between
175
SAMPLE ESSAY ONE
the two poems, then, an unresolved marital drama unfolds.
Williams’s mastery of the fundamental powers of language to
describe the shape and substance of human relationships turns
these short poems into rich and nuanced stories about decades of
married life.
Works Cited (MLA 8 format)
Liebowitz, Herbert. Something Urgent I Have to Say You”: The Life
and Works of William Carlos Williams. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011.
“plum, n. and adj.2.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December 2019,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/146028. Accessed 6 January 2020.
“that, pron.1, adj., and adv.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December
2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/200177. Accessed 6 January
2020.
“the, adj., pron.2, and n.1.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December
2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/200211. Accessed 6 January
2020.
“this, pron. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December 2019,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/200894. Accessed 6 January 2020.
“which, pron. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December 2019,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/228284. Accessed 6 January 2020.
“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia,
https:/len.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams.
Accessed 10 January 2020.
Williams, William Carlos. “Reply.” The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz
and Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p.
536. ——. “This Is Just To Say.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and
Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p. 372.
176
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
Bringing in Social
and Historical Contexts
(Ch. 4)
ASSIGNMENT: Write a four- to six-page essay (1000-1500 words)
about “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, using the
poem and any or all of the following reference works: a dictionary
(especially the OED), an encyclopedia, a biography of Williams, and
a scholarly edition (annotations and introduction). In addition, you
must use some sources (reference works and scholarly articles) that
provide information about the social and historical contexts for the
poem. The aim of the essay is to help us understand the poem in
relation to those contexts.
This kind of essay builds on the work you would do for the
shorter essay that uses your close reading and reference works to
support the argument. To compose this essay, I began by reviewing
the poem, my close reading, and the material from reference works
that I used in Essay One. In addition, I used databases in my library
to look for books, essays, and articles that might help me under-
stand something about how a poem like “This Is Just To Say” comes
177
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
from and speaks to its social and historical contexts. The poem was
published in 1934, so that date provides an anchor for our under-
standing of the contexts of both its composition and its reception.
THE RESEARCH QUESTION
When we want to talk about the spine of an essay in
English studies, we mean the thesis. The thesis is the main
statement we are trying to prove in the essay. In other
disciplines, especially sciences and social sciences, the
process of composing an essay or report hinges on defining
the research question. The research question asks, what
is the relationship between one thing or phenomenon and
another? It might say, “What are the effects of airborne
particulates on migratory bird navigation?” or “Do people
who exercise daily report higher levels of satisfaction in
romantic relationships?” or “Does increasing access
to public transit decrease the amount that people drive
personal vehicles in urban settings?” It may help you to
conceptualize your thesis statement to know that it’s just
a variation on the research question: it’s a question turned
into a statement.
For Essay One, my thesis was that the poem shows us
one way in which language builds intimacy, as opposed
to just reflecting it. I could write this as a question that
follows the form of a scientific research question instead:
“Does language create intimacy in ‘This Is Just To Say’?
It’s really just a convention: humanities research typically
presents a statement to be argued, while scientific research
typically asks a question to be answered. If thinking of
your thesis as a research question helps you—especially in
the sense that it encourages you to go to your “lab” (your
library!) and do some “experiments” (putting ideas from
reading together) so as to discover or prove something
(Eureka!)—then go for it!
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BRINGING IN SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS (CH. 4)
On pages 63-67 I describe my research strategy and process
and review some of the things I found out about domestic life for
white, middle-class America in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. Labor-saving devices made housework and food preparation
easier, but they also spurred changes. Extended families became less
common, and the nuclear family (Mum and Dad and kids) became
the norm. Middle-class families were less likely to hire domestic
help, and working-class families were less likely to be employed as
cooks, cleaners, gardeners, or childminders. Economic pressures
from the Great Depression took a toll on families, as people moved
to find work, delayed marriage and childbearing, and generally
struggled. The US government encouraged women to stay home
and not work, so as to make it more likely that men (who tradition-
ally earned more money and had more choices of employment) could
find jobs. All of these factors led to a reshaped family and altered
roles for wives and husbands within them. In the new family, there
was greater opportunity for intimacy and companionship between
husbands and wives. In the course of the century, positive and
affirming depictions of this kind of relationship proliferated, giving
rise to our modern, Western conception of marriage as an alliance
between two people, built on love, emotional companionship, and
sexual intimacy. In many ways, this image of marriage defined, for
North America, the twentieth-century values of family, community,
and society.
In terms of “This Is Just To Say,” I wrote that, given this con-
text, the poem “appears to challenge older ideas about marriage and
to embrace new ideas that emphasize shared intimacy, communica-
tion, and affectionate companionship. At the same time, the poem
makes what we can read as a social phenomenon intensely personal”
(p. 65). If we were to phrase this as a research question, we might
ask, “How does the depiction of marriage in “This Is Just To Say’
relate to how marriage was understood socially and politically at
the time it was written?” Whether we are aiming at proving a thesis
statement or answering a research question, we can get there with
some hard work, tough thinking, and smooth writing. Let’s do it!
Fok x
179
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
Katherine Acheson (#084310962)
January 20, 2020
Marriage, Domesticity, and
W. C. Williams’s “This Is Just To Say”
“This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams is about the
relationship between the speaker or writer of the poem and its
listener or reader. Through the choices the poet makes of the
form of the poem, its vocabulary, and its grammatical features,
we understand that the speaker and the listener are married:
their relationship is everyday and down-to-earth; it is between
people who have a long and close history together; it is sensual
and intimate. The poem depicts what is called “companionate
marriage,” a term coined in the 1920s to describe “marriage
unions held together not by rigid social pressures or religious
conceptions of moral duty but by mutual affection, sexual
attraction, and equal rights” (Mintz and Kellogg 115). While this
form of marriage may appear both natural and normal in our
current society, it was (and remains) a historical phenomenon,
very much of its time and place, and one which was variously
promoted and contested during the period of its ascension. The
poem’s companion piece, “Reply,” written by Williams in the
voice of the listener of “This Is Just To Say,” expresses a much
1 The emblematic form of companionate marriage joins two people who identify
as “opposite” sexes (therefore heteronormative), middle-class and suburban (and
therefore white), and procreational; it is a relationship sanctioned and supported by the state and by organized religion.
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BRINGING IN SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS (CH. 4)
more perfunctory and traditional view of marriage. In that view,
the wife serves the needs of the husband and neither expects
nor offers either emotional or sensual intimacy; she does not
have equality with him, nor does she seem to seek it. “Reply”
contextualizes “This Is Just To Say” and reveals it to be part of
a conversation—or perhaps a monologue, given that one person
wrote both poems—about marriage in early-twentieth-century
America.
“This Is Just To Say” depicts an early-twentieth-century,
upper-middle-class American marriage in its material, everyday
reality. The choice of words in the poem conveys this. The nouns
“plums,” “icebox,” and “breakfast,” for example) are all concrete
things, rather than abstract concepts. “The plums” (1. 2) are
specific, physical plums, not metaphors or ideas, and they were
in “the icebox” (I. 4), which is also an object with functional
properties for the people who own it. “This” in the title is a
demonstrative pronoun; it points from the speaker to the poem
itself, at least in its own fiction as a note between two people
(“this, 1.27). “I” and “you” are pronouns whose meaning is
relative to who is doing the speaking. As readers of the poem, we
infer that “I” and “you” know who each other are, and that there
is no ambiguity for them in the communication: the conversation
is private to the two of them. These words, the meanings of which
we usually take for granted and which we often overlook when
we think about the vocabulary of a piece of literature, contribute
to the way in which the poem evokes an actual space in which
181
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
people go about their daily lives and the relationships they have in
that space.
The vocabulary of the poem also suggests that sensual
and possibly sexual pleasures are routinely shared between the
two people. “Plums” are sweet, rich, and velvety; they are also
red or purple, both colors associated with the human body and
especially with intimate or inner parts (“plum 11.7”). The plums
” are “delicious,” “so sweet,” and “so cold”; the experience of eating
them is a sensual pleasure. If the language suggests sensuality,
the fact that the speaker enjoyed the plums by themself suggests
that they denied those pleasures to the reader or listener—
pleasures the reader or listener seems to have planned on, as they
were “probably/saving [the plums]/for breakfast” (Il. 6-8). The
speaker’s demand, “Forgive me” (1. 9), can be seen in this context
as a slightly dramatic overstatement of transgression and remorse,
designed to both acknowledge the sin and deflect or minimize its
punishment. The sexual nuances of the description of eating the
plums suggests both physical and emotional intimacy between
the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader.
“1” The intimacy of “I” to “you” is reinforced by the use of verbs
in the poem. The use of the present perfect tense, “I have eaten,”
which usually describes an action recently completed, initiates a
timeline for the poem’s events. Within the timeline, we recognize
the time immediately before the speaker ate the plums, when the
decision was made, and the time immediately after, when they are
« experienced as “delicious,” “so sweet/and so cold” (Il. 10-12). But
182
BRINGING IN SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS (CH. 4)
there is also the future that didn’t happen, signaled by the use
of the conditional “were probably/saving” (ll. 6-7), in which the
recipient of the poem’s wishes were fulfilled, and the future that
will happen, in which the recipient does—or does not—accede
to the demand to “Forgive me” (1. 9). The verbs describe people
who live together and have shared history in which their actions
impact each other and their preferences and potential reactions
are known to each other.
In all these respects—the shared material and everyday
reality, the sensual or sexual dimension of the relationship,
and the duration and intimacy of the relationship—the
poem depicts “companionate marriage.” In the ideal of the
companionate marriage, wives and husbands share equally in
the responsibilities and rewards of marriage; they enjoy each
other’s love and respect; they freely devote their shared welfare
and the sustenance of their nuclear family. With changes in the
technology of the home (such as vacuum cleaners and washing
machines) that increased the solitude of individuals and couples,
especially in an upper-middle-class setting such as that enjoyed
by the Williams family and depicted in the poem (Coleman et al.
52), husbands and wives were discovering and experimenting with
new ways of communicating and with new forms of intimacy and
companionship. In Images of Family Life in Magazine Advertising,
1920-1978, Bruce W. Brown says there was a steady rise in the
depiction of intimacy between family members (75) and that
there was just as steady a decrease in the depiction of wives
183
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
doing housework (31). While the speaker acknowledges the wife’s
territorial privileges over the plums, he stresses two other things
in their relationship: the enjoyment of shared sensual experience
of communicating about experience, about each other’s feelings,
and about each other’s work and life in the household.
When it was published in Williams's Collected Poems, “This Is
Just to Say” was annotated with a footnote in which readers found
another poem, called “Reply.” While both poems are by Williams,
“Reply” is written in the voice of the recipient of “This Is Just To
Say” and is signed “Love. Floss,” the familiar name of Williams's
wife Florence (“William Carlos Williams”):
“Reply”
(crumped on her desk)
Dear Bill: I've made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you'll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.
On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea
184
BRINGING IN SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS (CH. 4)
Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
1 didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—
See you later. Love. Floss.
Please switch off the telephone.
Like “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” refers to the prosaic, everyday
life of a married couple whose long story is made of many short
sentences. But unlike “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” resists
intimacy, shared history, and the mutual respect of equals. In
comparison to the first poem, the view of marriage depicted
in “Reply” may strike us as dull and even quietly aggressive,
as if the wife is withholding the affection and warmth her
husband extends. Floss’s resistance to companionate marriage
was very much mainstream: in the period, “media portrayals
of autonomous women in egalitarian marriages tended to
show marriages in trouble until the woman allowed herself to
be ‘domesticated, either by having children and settling down
or by subordinating herself to the wishes of a strong husband”
(Coleman et al. 79).
Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Williams is
the author of Floss’s voice in this poem. Through that voice he
185
SAMPLE ESSAY TWO
represents a world in which it is women, or rather wives, who
reject companionship and affection from their husbands and
turn aside from expressions of sensual intimacy and domestic
partnership. In the view articulated between the two poems,
wives are capable of rejecting what appears, on the surface at
least, to be greater equality and respect within marriage, even
as their husbands promote those values. However, what appears
to be a dialogue in which husband and wife are given equal
time is, in fact, a monologue or meditation by Williams on the
subjects of his marriage and his wife, and marriage and wives in
general. Between the two poems, then, we see how the source or
control of representation, or who writes the script for the speaker,
powerfully disrupts our ability to read arguments as having
“sides,” while at the same time ensuring that we understand
that one person can entertain many views. “This Is Just To Say”
and “Reply” imply that communication is straightforward and
unequivocal; together, however, the prove exactly the opposite.
Works Cited (MLA 8 format)
Coleman, Marilyn, et al. Family Life in 20th-Century America.
Greenwood Press, 2007.
Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social
History of American Family Life. The Free Press, 1988.
“this, pron. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December 2019,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/200894. Accessed 6 January 2020.
“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia,
https:/len.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams.
Accessed 10 January 2020.
186
BRINGING IN SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXTS (CH. 4)
Williams, William Carlos. “Reply.” The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz
and Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p.
536.
——. “This Is Just To Say.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and
Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p. 372.
187
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
Incorporating
Critical Works
(Ch. 5)
ASSIGNMENT: Write a six- to eight-page (1,500-2,000 words) essay
about “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, using the
poem, selected critical or theoretical insights collected from schol-
arly books and journal articles, and any reference works and social
or historical contexts you find helpful. The aim of the essay is to
help us understand the poem in relation to the full range of resour-
ces available, including the critical conversation that is relevant to
it. That conversation might be explicitly about the poem, the poet,
or his works, or more broadly about some dimension of language,
a philosophical concept, a cognitive phenomenon, the characteris-
tics and functions of poetic genres, or any other big question that
interests you about the poem, and about which other critical minds
have taken an interest.
This kind of essay builds on the work you might do for the
other sample essays included in this book. To compose Essay Three,
I reviewed the material, including the poetry and my notes from
189
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
reference works and information about social and historical con-
texts. I then searched in an online bibliography (MLAB) for various
key words and phrases related to “This Is Just To Say,” Williams,
and the insights I generated in the other two essays. I ended up
leafing through (figuratively—I was working online) the tables of
contents of all issues of the William Carlos Williams Review available
to me, which gave me a sense of the kinds of interests scholars have
had in WCW’s work. Much of the scholarship is about Williams’s
theories about poetry and those of the groups of poets with whom
he was affiliated. Another popular topic is the representation of
women across the spectrum of his writing, from journals, to poet-
ics and poems. There is some analysis of Williams's use of genres of
poetry, including lyric, of which “This Is Just To Say” is an example.
As we know from my previous essays, I'm interested in lan-
guage and how poetry produces the illusion of a material world
and a conversation within it, and I'm interested in gender and its
representation. I'm also interested in poetry in general, and genres
of poetry. In addition to sampling essays about Williams and gender,
1 also read some works about the genre of lyric poetry and his use
of the conventions. Jonathan Culler’s 2015 book Theory of the Lyric
provided a rich and interesting survey of the genre from ancient
Greek poetry to the present and undergirds some of my analysis.
But, as usual, I discovered this essay as I wrote it, re-wrote it, read
it, and re-read it. Good luck with yours.
HOW HARD HAS THIS BEEN, PROF A?
I have to admit—well I don’t have to, but I'm going to—
that writing these sample essays has been hard for me, and
they got progressively harder; this last one has been the
most difficult.
Critical theory and scholarly interpretations are built
over many years, even the length of careers, within con-
texts that are rich and diverse and that can be sustaining
and rewarding, although they are not always. Published
literary criticism and theory are serious, complex, demand-
ing things to read and to write; their authors have usually
190
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
chosen the field or topic, and have worked in it for years.
You are not expected, even as an upper-level undergradu-
ate, to be able to work with ease and fluency with these
ideas and concepts. In my classes, the priority for me for
my students is that they learn to use some of the tools and
expertise that already exists in order to open up litera-
ture and theory for their own knowledge, enjoyment, and
empowerment. I'm happy facilitating that conversation
and those discoveries, and I teach a range of subjects.
As a scholar, however, I work on topics that are all
set within a particular national and historical context
(British literature 1500-1700). I read and write essays and
books within the context of a conversation that has been
going on for a long time, and which I have been part of
for thirty years. The boundaries of it shift and break, but
the people in it share some common touchstones and they
are expected to acknowledge them. For instance, we don’t
agree about what Shakespeare’s work means, what value
it has, or how we should come to conclusions about those
things—and we never will. But we have all read much of
Shakespeare’s work, we know central arguments about
that work that have come out in the last 20 years or so, and
the historical, linguistic, and social contexts are familiar
to us. If we don’t know them, we know how to find out
about them, and we understand the terms under which
they are written. Because of my training and the confines
of my career, I don’t really know much about Williams or
“This Is Just To Say” or the social, historical, and literary
contexts of the first half of the twentieth century in the
United States. To tell you the truth, it was hard for me to
understand what the take-aways are from the articles I
read, and I'm not super-confident in the persuasiveness or
value of the result.
Does this sound familiar to you? I think it’s been a good
experience for me—my understanding of what it’s like for
you, as an undergraduate student, to approach an essay
assignment in an upper-level literature course has been
enhanced. It’s made me think that I need to learn and teach
191
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
more about how to handle those feelings (of ignorance, or
even of intimidation and aversion) in my classrooms. It
reminds me of why I started teaching the things in this
book—that there is nothing natural about the essay form,
and what you already know isn’t necessarily helpful. It
strengthened my commitment to work with students to
identify quality resources and to scaffold their knowledge
as they build more and more complex arguments. It has
also encouraged me to find diverse ways to reach the learn-
ing outcomes in my courses, so that inexperience with or
aversion to the essay form doesn’t prevent students from
learning or me from teaching effectively.
*hkF
English 430
Professor Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Katherine Acheson (084310962)
July 8, 2020
Lyric and Sexism in W. C. Williams’s “This Is Just To Say”
“This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams is a lyric
poem about the relationship between the speaker or writer of
the poem and its listener or reader. Through the choices the poet
makes of the form of the poem, its vocabulary, and its grammatical
features, we understand that the speaker and the listener are
married: their relationship is everyday and down-to-earth; it
is between people who have a long and close history together;
it is sensual and intimate. The poem depicts what is called
“companionate marriage,” a term coined in the 1920s to describe
192
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
“« marriage unions held together not by rigid social pressures or
religious conceptions of moral duty but by mutual affection, sexual
attraction, and equal rights” (Mintz and Kellogg 115). The poem’s
companion piece, “Reply,” written by Williams in the voice of
Flossie, the recipient of “This Is Just To Say,” expresses a much
more perfunctory and traditional view of marriage. In that view,
the wife serves the needs of the husband and neither expects nor
offers either emotional or sensual intimacy; she does not have
equality with him, nor does she seem to seek it.
Together the two poems reveal what many critics identify
as sexism in Williams's representation of women, and especially
of the figure of the wife in his poems about domestic life.
However, not all critics agree that Williams’s work is sexist.
Some temper the claim with evidence that he supported
women’s rights in social matters, such as the right to vote for
qualified white women. Others rationalize Williams's sexism
by appealing to the conventions of lyric poetry which prioritize
subjective perceptions and experiences. Within that argument,
it is the quality and resonance of the expression, and not the
ethical or social content, that establish the value of the poem.
Criticism of the poem, then, articulates one of the key conflicts
in modern literary studies: can we appreciate the craft and
beauty of a poem which expresses ideological views that we
acknowledge as harmful? Or is aestheticizing sexism just
putting lipstick on a pig?
193
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
“This Is Just To Say” depicts an early-twentieth-century,
upper-middle-class American marriage in its material, everyday,
reality. The choice of words in the poem conveys this. The nouns
(“plums,” “icebox,” and “breakfast,” for example) are all concrete
things, rather than abstract concepts. The vocabulary of the
poem also suggests that sensual and possibly sexual pleasures are
routinely shared between the two people. “Plums” are sweet, rich,
and velvety; they are also red or purple, both colors associated
with the human body and especially with intimate or inner parts
» « (“plum 11.7”). The plums are “delicious,” “so sweet,” and “so
cold”; the experience of eating them is a sensual pleasure. If the
language suggests sensuality, the fact that the speaker enjoyed
the plums by themself suggests that they denied those pleasures
to the reader or listener—pleasures the reader or listener seems
to have planned on, as they were “probably/saving [the plums]/
for breakfast” (Il. 6-8). The sexual nuances of the description of
eating the plums suggest both physical and emotional intimacy
between the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader. The
intimacy of “I” to “you,” and the sense of their shared history, is
reinforced by the use of verbs in the poem, such as the use of the
present perfect tense (“I have eaten”), which usually describes
an action recently completed. Within the timeline initiated by
this verb, we recognize the moment immediately before the
speaker ate the plums when the decision was made to eat them,
and the time immediately after, when they are experienced as
3 “delicious,” “so sweet/and so cold” (ll. 10-12). But there is also the
194
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
future that didn’t happen, signaled by the use of the conditional
“were probably/saving” (ll. 6-7) in which the recipient of the
poem’s wishes were fulfilled, and the future that will happen, in
which the recipient does—or does not—accede to the demand to
“Forgive me” (l. 9). The verbs describe people who live together
and have shared history in which their actions impact each
other and their preferences and potential reactions are known
to each other.
In all these respects—the shared material and everyday
reality, the sensual or sexual dimension of the relationship, and
the duration and intimacy of the relationship—the poem depicts
“companionate marriage.” In the ideal of the companionate
marriage, wives and husbands share equally in the responsibilities
and rewards of marriage; they enjoy each other’s love and respect;
they freely devote their shared welfare and the sustenance of
their nuclear family. While the speaker acknowledges the wife’s
territorial privileges over the plums, he stresses two other things
in their relationship: the enjoyment of shared sensual experience
of communicating about experience, about each other’s feelings,
and about each other’s work and life in the household.
When it was published in Williams's Collected Poems, “This
Is Just To Say” was annotated with a footnote in which readers
found another poem, called “Reply.” While both poems are by
Williams, “Reply” is written in the voice of the recipient of “This
Is Just To Say” and is signed “Love. Floss,” the familiar name of
Williams’s wife Florence (“William Carlos Williams”):
195
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
“Reply”
(crumped on her desk)
Dear Bill: I've made a
couple of sandwiches for you.
In the ice-box you'll find
blue-berries—a cup of grapefruit
a glass of cold coffee.
On the stove is the tea-pot
with enough tea leaves
for you to make tea if you
prefer—Just light the gas—
boil the water and put it in the tea
Plenty of bread in the bread-box
and butter and eggs—
1 didn’t know just what to
make for you. Several people
called up about office hours—
See you later. Love. Floss.
Please switch off the telephone.
196
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
Like “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” refers to the prosaic, everyday
life of a married couple whose long story is made of many short
sentences. But unlike “This Is Just To Say,” “Reply” resists
intimacy, shared history, and the mutual respect of equals. In
the view articulated between the two poems, wives are capable
of rejecting what appears, on the surface at least, to be greater
equality and respect within marriage, even as their husbands
promote those values. However, both poems are written by
Williams: what appears to be a dialogue in which husband and
wife are given equal time is, in fact, a monologue or meditation
by Williams on the subjects of his marriage and his wife, and
marriage and wives in general.
Most critics identify Williams as a sexist writer whose poetry
represents him in terms typical of patriarchal discourse about
masculinity: “the self-image Williams projects in his writing,”
writes Graham, is one “of the male artist replete with sexual vigor
in pursuit of the generic woman” (166). Celia Carlson writes that
“much of Williams's energy in his lyric poetry comes from his
attempts to harness what he viewed in rather traditional terms
as the feminine power of the body” (Carlson 27). By and large,
according to Graham, Williams's writing reflects his conviction
that marriage was both what kept him grounded in the present
and the material and what prevented him from fulfilling himself
as a writer and genius: “How he portrayed his wife and marriage
in his writing over fifty years is directly related to that self-image
and the dream of merging with this ever-appealing, ever-receptive
197
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
woman” (Graham 166). Whenever his wife appears, as we see in
“Reply,” “the writing is not about her but about her relation to him”
(Graham 170; emphasis in original). “In the drama of their life
together, one of the most compelling stories he knew, Williams
portrayed himself as the tormented artist, repeatedly tempted
to overthrow his conventional life—represented by Flossie—and
repeatedly retreating into the familiar and certain still center she
provided” (Graham 170). Williams's objectifying description of
the female body within stories that are set in medical practice
(Schnur) and his frequent representation of unfaithful husbands
(Graham 170)—both reflective of his real life—do little to provide
relief from the charge that his work is deeply sexist and that he
regarded his wife and other women as less than equal to him.
Critics who defend Williams's representation of gender and
sex do not typically draw upon evidence of his behavior outside
of authorship or offer alternative readings of the representation
of gender and sex in his literary work to do so. Rather, they
attempt to elevate the literary and philosophical values of the
work above its content, its design above its impact, its theoretical
finesse above the meaning we might ordinarily take from it. Some
critics displace Williams's discourse about female bodies onto
theoretical paradigms, especially those espoused or developed by
Williams and his peers (Imagist and Modernist poets, for the most
part). Celia Carlson, for example, aligns the female body as a form
with literature as a formal activity, thereby elevating Williams’s
objectification of women as itself a literary achievement. Likewise,
198
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
Emily Lambeth-Climaco asserts that Williams's treatment of
objects, in the context of his much-repeated dictum that there are
“No ideas but in things,” “signifies reaching after a consummate
mode of contact, one that bridges the gulf between individual
experience and the real world” (36). Charles Altieri attests to the
understanding of the (or his) human condition that the speaker
of “This Is Just To Say” attains in the process of the poem: “The
justness of the speaker’s note is its recognition of his weakness
and its lovely combination of self-understanding with an implicit
faith in his wife’s capacity to understand and accept his deed and,
beyond that, to comprehend his human existence as a balance of
weakness, self-knowledge, and concern” (501).
For these critics, the form of the lyric itself transcends
the dross of earthly inequities and the social burdens of sexual
difference. Lyric poetry, according to Jonathan Culler, is a
“subjective form” in which “the lyric poet absorbs into himself
the external world and stamps it with inner consciousness, and
the unity of the poem is provided by this subjectivity” (1). It is
subjectivity—the experience of the self—that is the fundamental
topic of the lyric poem, and the value of the poem lies in its
capacity to convey that subjectivity. The poem is real in ways
that its content is not: in “This Is Just To Say,” writes Altieri,
“we are dealing with two speech acts—one by a character in the
poem which is to be assessed dramatically, and one by an implicit
poet which invites us to draw parallels between the dramatic
situation and general aesthetic considerations” (499-500). The
199
SAMPLE ESSAY THREE
second speech act is the one that constitutes the poem and the
one through which the other is framed and our interpretation is
conditioned. In these terms, any offensive content or context is
not meaningful in terms of our valuation of the poem; it is outside
the subjective experience of the poetic consciousness represented
therein. The lyric form and the critics who respect its power,
beauty, and complexity have the capacity to make sexism, and
other social phenomena with which they engage, invisible, or, at
least, inscrutable.
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. “Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The
Example of Williams’ “This Is Just To Say.” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 5, no. 3, 1979, pp- 489-510.
Ashton, Jennifer. “Lyric, Gender, and Subjectivity in Modern and
Contemporary Women’s Poetry.” The Cambridge History of
American Women's Literature, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 515-38.
Carlson, Celia. “Compelling Objects: Form and Emotion in
Williams’s Lyric Poetry.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol.
26, no. 1, 2006, pp. 27-50.
Culler, Jonathan. Theory of the Lyric. Harvard UP, 2015. E-book
version.
Graham, Theodora R. “Williams, Flossie, and the Others: The
Aesthetics of Sexuality.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 28, no.
2, 1987, pp. 163-86.
Hilldebrandt, Claudia, et al. “Theories of Lyric.” Journal of
Literary Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-11.
Lambeth-Climaco, Emily. ““This Rhetoric is Real: William Carlos
Williams’s Recalibration of Language and Things.” William
Carlos William Review, vol. 28, nos. 1-2, 2008, pp. 35-53.
Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social
History of American Family Life. The Free Press, 1988.
99
200
INCORPORATING CRITICAL WORKS (CH. 5)
Morris, Daniel. “This Is Just To Say This Is the End of Art:
Williams and the Aesthetic Attitude.” William Carlos William
Review, vol. 32, nos. 1-2, 2015, pp. 53-65.
“plum, n. and adj.2.” OED Online, Oxford UP, December 2019,
www.oed.com/view/Entry/146028. Accessed 6 January 2020.
Schnur, Kate. “I found another to admire The Thing of
the Female Body in William Carlos Williams's Medical
Narratives.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 33, nos. 1-2,
2016, pp. 172-88.
“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams.
Accessed 10 January 2020.
Williams, William Carlos. “Reply.” The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz
and Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p.
536.
——. “This Is Just To Say.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos
Williams. Volume I: 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and
Christopher MacGowan, New Directions Press, 1986, p. 372.
201
Works Cited
Altieri, Charles. “Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The
Example of Williams’ “This Is Just to Say.” Critical Inquiry,
vol. 5, no. 3, 1979, pp. 489-510.
Brown, Bruce W. Images of Family Life in Magazine Advertising,
1920-1978. Praeger, 1981.
Carlson, Allan. The “American Way”: Family and Community in the
Shaping of the American Identity. 1SI Books, 2003.
Carlson, Celia. “Compelling Objects: Form and Emotion in
Williams’s Lyric Poetry.” William Carlos Williams Review, vol.
26, no. 1, 2006, pp. 27-49.
The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th ed., U of Chicago P, 2003.
Coleman, Marilyn, et al. Family Life in 20th-Century America.
Greenwood, 2007.
Davis, Simone Weil. Living up to the Ads: Gender Fictions of the
1920s. Duke UP, 2000.
203
WORKS CITED
Graham, Theodora R. “Williams, Flossie, and the Others: The
Aesthetics of Sexuality.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 28, no.
2, 1987, pp. 163-86.
Imlah, Mick. “Imagism.” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-
Century Poetry in English, edited by lan Hamilton, Oxford UP,
1996.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Edited by
Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, Johns
Hopkins UP, 2005, http://litguide.press.jhu.edu/.
Johnson, Bob. “A Whole Synthesis of His Time”: Political
Ideology and Cultural Politics in the Writings of William
Carlos Williams, 1929-1939.” American Quarterly, vol. 54, no.
2, 2002, pp. 179-215. The Milton Reading Room. Edited by Thomas Luxon, Dartmouth
College, 1997-2010, http:/lwww.dartmouth.edu/~milton/
reading_room/contents/index.shtml.
MLA International Bibliography. Modern Language
Association, 2020, https://www.mla.org/Publications/
MLA-International-Bibliography.
Modern Language Association of America. MLA Handbook. 8th
ed., Modern Language Association, 2016.
Morris, Daniel. “The Erotics of Close Reading: Williams, Demuth,
and ‘The Crimson of Cyclamen.” William Carlos Williams
Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 2007, pp. 57-68.
The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English.
Edited by Ian Hamilton. Oxford UP, 1996.
Oxford Reference Online, http:/fwww.oxfordreference.com.
Accessed 3 October 2009.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 130.” The Norton Shakespeare,
edited by Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed., WW. Norton,
2008, p. 1798.
Tufte, Edward. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint™: Pitching Out
Corrupts Within. 2nd ed., Graphics Press, 2006.
“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Wikimedia Foundation, 17 June 2010, http:/fen.wikipedia.org/
wiki/William_Carlos_Williams. Accessed 5 July 2010.
Williams, William Carlos. Autobiography. Random House, 1951.
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——. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1909-1939.
Edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, vol. 1,
New Directions, 1986.
——. Paterson. Edited by Christopher MacGowan, rev. ed., New
Directions, 1992.
——. Selected Essays. New Directions, 1954.
——. The William Carlos Williams Reader. Edited by M.L. Rosenthal.
J. Laughlin for New Directions, 1966.
Wimsatt, W.K., and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.”
The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, UP of
Kentucky, 1954, pp. 3-18.
205
Permissions
Acknowledgment
Williams, William Carlos. “This Is Just To Say,” from The
Collected Poems: Volume I: 1909-1939, copyright © 1938 by
New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Carcanet Press Ltd.
207
Subject Index
aboutness, 31-33
adverbs
adverbs of degree, 142
conjunctive adverbs, 130, 143
alliteration, 28
allusion, 28
annotations, 47
apostrophes, 132-33
apparatus, of the text, 49
arguments, 85-86. See also evi-
dence; thesis statement
asphyxiation, 129
authors
biographies, research from, 57
implied author, 26-27
Beardsley, Monroe
“The Intentional Fallacy” (with
Wimsatt), 57
bibliographies, 72-75, 76, 150
biographies, author, 57
body paragraphs, 115-20
209
introduction and conclusion, 115,
122-23, 166
basis in research and thesis
statement, 115-17, 119
being kind to readers, 117
concluding sentences, 118-19
paragraphs, features of, 10-11,
119-20
See also conclusion; thesis state-
ment (introduction)
SUBJECT INDEX
Boolean operators, 62, 74
breaks, when writing, 122
categories, for evidence, 87-90, 164
charts, for evidence, 90-96
Chicago Manual of Style (CMS)
documentation system, 150
clauses, independent and depen-
dent, 136. See also punctuation
and sentence structure
The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams, 1909-1939
(Williams), 47-48
commas
comma splices, 138-39
vs. semicolons, 137-38
communication, effective, 9-11. See
also writing
complementary illustrations,
155-56
concluding sentences
in body paragraphs, 118-19
in thesis statement (introduc-
tion), 107-09, 111
conclusion, 120-21, 166. See also
body paragraphs; thesis state-
ment (introduction)
conjunctions
introduction, 130-31
conjunctive adverbs, 130, 143
coordinating conjunctions, 130,
138,141
subordinating conjunctions, 130,
136, 138-39, 140, 142
connecting words. See adverbs;
conjunctions
contractions, 132
coordinating conjunctions, 130,
138, 141
critical assessments (secondary
sources), 69-83
introduction and conclusion,
69-71, 82
assessing resources, 71-72
author’s experience with, 190-92
bibliographies, for finding, 72-75
books vs. journals, 74
note taking, 79-82
number needed for essay, 75-76
reading tips, 76-79
writing essays without, 109-12
deductive reasoning, 102-03
Defining Gender (database), 59
definite articles, 29, 30, 49
definitions, of words, 39-42
deictics, 77
deliberative rhetoric, 129
delight, from literature, 6
demonstrative pronouns, 133-34
dependent clauses, 136. See also
punctuation and sentence
structure
diction, 128-29, 130
dictionaries, 23. Sce also Oxford
English Dictionary
digital (Internet) resources
Boolean operators and metadata,
62,74 critical and secondary sources,
71-72
electronic file formats, 152
encyclopedias, 50-51
illustrations, 152-53
Internet as resource, 170
note taking, 51-52
reliability issues, 48, 52
for social and historical contexts,
59-60
210
SUBJECT INDEX
Wikipedia, 50-51, 52
documentation, 147-50
introduction and conclusion, 147,
158, 167
bibliography vs. works cited, 150
illustrations, 152-53
methods of, 149-50
plagiarism and, 148-49
reasons for, 147-48
Early English Books Online (data-
base), 60
editing and proofreading, 127-45
introduction and conclusion,
127-28, 144, 166-67
apostrophes, 132-33
bad habits, 143-44
comma splices, 138-39
conjunctive adverbs, 130, 143
connecting words, 130-31
demonstrative pronouns, 133-34
diction, 128-29, 130
first person, 139
grammar, 131-36
“however,” use of term, 142
independent and dependent
clauses, 136
of introduction, 122
last-minute checks, 157
pronoun agreement, 134-35
punctuation and sentence struc-
ture, 136-40
semicolons, 136-38, 143-44
sentence fragments, 139-40, 141
spellcheckers, 128
subordinating conjunctions, 130,
136, 138-39, 140, 142
techniques for, 144
time management, 122
verb tense, 29, 135-36
vocabulary, 129-30
Eighteenth Century Journals (data-
base), 59
electronic file formats, 152
emotions, 24-25
encyclopedias, 50-51
English language, 37-39
enjambment, 28
essays about literature
approach to, 4, 7-8, 15, 163-68
body paragraphs, 115-20, 166
critical assessments (secondary
sources) and, 69-83
discussing your essay with
instructors, 34, 157, 158
documentation, 147-50, 158, 167
editing and proofreading,
127-45, 166-67
effective communication and,
9-11
evidence in, 8-9, 85-97, 163-64
grading, 4, 11, 14, 128, 157, 158
ideal essay, 4
plagiarism, 148-49
presentation, 151-58, 167
pride in, 149
purpose of literature and, 5-7
reference works and, 35-53
rereading and, 107
research within text, 19-34
social and historical contexts
research, 55-67
subjectivity and, 11-14
thesis statement, 101-13, 165
time management when writing,
80,122
without secondary sources,
109-12
See also specific topics
etymology, 37-39
211
SUBJECT INDEX
evidence, 85-97
introduction, 163-64
arguments and, 85-86, 96
categorizing evidence, 87-90,
164
charting evidence, 90-96
evidence that does not fit, 94
importance of, 8-9
reviewing labeled evidence,
86-87
See also critical assessments
(secondary sources); literary
texts, research and analysis;
reference works; social and
historical contexts
exemplary illustrations, 154-55
facsimiles, 59
feelings, 24-25
file formats, electronic, 152
first impressions, 21-22, 28, 31,
33-34, 89-90
first person, 139
forensic rhetoric, 129
grading, 4, 11, 14, 128, 157, 158
grammar, 131-36
introduction, 10, 131-32
apostrophes, 132-33
demonstrative pronouns, 133-34
misplaced modifiers, 132
pronoun agreement, 134-35
unclear pronoun references, 132
verb tense, 29, 135-36
See also conjunctions; punctua-
tion and sentence structure
guiding questions, 22
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
aboutness and, 31
comma splices and, 138-39
complementary illustrations
and, 155-56
conjunctive adverbs and, 143
punctuation for lists and, 137-38
semicolons and, 137
sentence fragments and, 141
subordinating conjunctions and,
140
unclear pronoun references and,
131,132
usage of terms and, 42-43
verb tense and, 135-36
vocabulary and, 22-23
historical contexts. See social and
historical contexts
homonyms, 128
“however,” use of term, 142
ideal essay, 4
ideas, letting go of, 119
identification, with people repre-
sented in text, 26-27
illustrations
complementary illustrations,
155-56
documentation and sources,
152-53
exemplary illustrations, 154-55
multimedia formats and, 153-54,
156
resolution, 152
supplementary illustrations, 156
imagism, 60
imitation of life, literature as, 6-7
imperative mood, 29
implied author, 26-27
implied readers/spectators, 27
independent clauses, 136. See also
punctuation and sentence
structure
inductive reasoning, 102
212
SUBJECT INDEX
instruction, literature as, 5-6
intellectual property, 148
intentional fallacy, 57
Internet. See digital resources
introduction. See thesis statement
“Introduction,” in scholarly editions,
47
labels, 21, 81, 87-88. See also note
taking
last-minute checks, 157
libraries and librarians, 36, 59, 72,
73,76 lists, punctuation for, 137-38
literary criticism. See critical
assessments
literary movements, 57-58
literary texts, research and analysis,
19-34
aboutness, 31-33
feelings invoked by text, 24-25
first impressions, 21-22, 28, 31,
33-34, 89-90 guiding questions, 22
identification with people repre-
sented, 26-27
introduction and conclusion, 19,
33-34 note taking, 20-21
on technique, 28-30
on vocabulary, 22-23
literary theory, 70. See also critical
assessments
literature, 5-7, 55, 168. See also
essays about literature
loaded questions, 3
metadata, 62
Milton, John
Paradise Lost, 43-44
misplaced modifiers, 132
Modern Language Association
(MLA) documentation system,
150
Modern Language Association
International Bibliography
(MLAIB), 72-73
multimedia essays, 153-54, 156
North American Immigrant Letters,
Diaries, and Oral Histories (data-
base), 60
North American Women’s Letters and
Diaries (database), 59
note taking
critical and secondary sources,
79-82
Internet sources, 51-52
of literary text, 20-21
Oxford English Dictionary, 42, 45
scholarly editions, 49
Old English, 37, 39
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
36-45 definitions of words, 39-42
etymology, 37-39
examples of usage in, 42-45
introduction, 36-37
note taking, 42, 45
part of speech, when searching
for words, 37
Paradise Lost (Milton), 43-44
paragraphs, features of, 10-11,
119-20
paraphrases, 149
peer-reviewed publications, 71
plagiarism, 148-49
plot summary, 9
possession, 132
PowerPoint, 153
213
SUBJECT INDEX
presentation, 151-57
electronic file formats, 152
illustrations, 152-53, 154-56
introduction and conclusion, 147,
158, 167
layout and order, 151-52
multimedia formats, 153-54, 156
titles of works, 151
present perfect verb tense, 29
pride, in own work, 149
pronouns
demonstrative pronouns, 133-34
pronoun agreement, 134-35
unclear references, 132
proofreading. See editing and
proofreading
punctuation and sentence structure,
136-40
comma splices, 138-39
conjunctive adverbs, 130, 143
coordinating conjunctions, 130,
138, 141
“however,” use of term, 142
independent and dependent
clauses, 136
introduction, 10, 136
for lists, 137
semicolons, 136-38, 143-44
sentence fragments, 139-40, 141
subordinating conjunctions, 130,
136, 138-39, 140, 142
See also grammar
questions
guiding questions, 22
loaded questions, 3
research questions, 178
readers
being kind to, 117, 127-28
implied readers, 27
reasoning, inductive vs. deductive,
102-03
reference works, 35-53
dictionaries, 23
encyclopedias, 50-51
Internet sources, 51-52
introduction and conclusion,
35-36, 52-53 other sources, 52
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
36-45 reliability considerations, 36
scholarly editions, 45-49
for social and historical contexts
59-60
“Reply” (Williams), 48-49, 65
rereading, 107
>
research. See critical assessments
(secondary sources); evidence;
literary texts, research and
analysis; reference works; social
and historical contexts
research questions, 178
revisions. See editing and
proofreading
rhetoric, forensic and deliberative,
129
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 46
scholarly editions, 45-49
annotations, 47
availability considerations, 47,
48
“Introduction” section, 47
textual changes and canoniza-
tion, 45-46
“This Is Just To Say” (Williams)
and, 47-49 value of, 46, 49
secondary sources. See critical
assessments
214
SUBJECT INDEX
semicolons, 136-38, 143-44 body paragraphs derived from,
sentence fragments, 139-40, 141. 115-17
See also punctuation and sen- composing the body of, 106-07,
tence structure 111
Shakespeare, William, 12, 45-46 concluding sentences, 107-09,
Romeo and Juliet, 46 111
“Sonnet 130,” 45
See also Hamlet (Shakespeare)
slideware, 153
social and historical contexts, 55-67
identifying areas for investiga-
tion, 56-58
intentional fallacy and, 57
introduction and conclusion,
55-56, 66-67
literary movements, 57-58
research process, 61
resources for, 59-60
social phronema, 56-57
in “This Is Just To Say”
for essays without secondary
sources, 109-12
introduction and conclusion,
101-02, 113, 165
reasoning, inductive vs. deduct
ive, and, 102-03
vs. research question, 178
revisions, 122
subtopic sentences, 103-05, 110
topic, selection of, 105-06
troubleshooting, 112-13
use of term, 103
See also body paragraphs;
conclusion
(Williams), 60-65, 66
“Sonnet 130” (Shakespeare), 45
speaker, 26
spectators, implied, 27
spellcheckers, 128
structure. See paragraphs, features concluding paragraph for essay,
of 121
subjectivity, 11-14
“This Is Just To Say” (Williams)
aboutness, 31-33
body paragraphs, 116-19
categorizing evidence, 88-89
charting evidence, 91-95
critical and secondary sources
on, 73-75, 77-79, 81-82 definition of words in, 40-42, 52
demonstrative pronouns and,
133-34
etymology of words in, 38,53
examples of word usage and,
teacher-subjectivity, 13-14 43-44
technique, literary, 28-30. See also exemplary illustrations and,
grammar; paragraphs, features 154-55
feelings invoked by, 24-25
first impressions, 21, 31, 89-90
grammar, 29
subordinating conjunctions, 130,
136, 138-39, 140, 142
subtopic sentences, 103-05, 110
supplementary illustrations, 156
symbols, 35, 44-45
of; punctuation and sentence
structure
thesis statement (introduction),
101-13
215
SUBJECT INDEX
identification with people repre-
sented, 26-27
scholarly editions and, 47-49, 53
social and historical contexts,
60-65, 66 symbolism and, 44-45
technique, analysis of, 28-30
text of, 20
thesis statement without sec-
ondary sources, 110-12
thesis statement with secondary
sources, 104-05, 106-09
vocabulary, 23, 28-29
time management, when writing,
80, 122
titles, presentation of, 151
Tufte, Edward, 153
turducken, 40
verb tense, 29, 135-36
vocabulary
analysis of, 22-23
connecting words, 130-31
in literary theory, 70
word choice when writing, 9-10,
129-30
See also conjunctions; Oxford
English Dictionary
Wikipedia, 50-51, 52
William Carlos Williams Review
(journal), 72
Williams, William Carlos
biography, 51, 60-61
The Collected Poems of William
Carlos Williams, 1909-1939,
47-48 “Reply,” 48-49, 65 See also “This Is Just To Say”
(Williams)
Wimsatt, W.K.
“The Intentional Fallacy” (with
Beardsley), 57
word choice. See Oxford English
Dictionary; vocabulary
works cited, 76, 150. See also
bibliographies
writing
being kind to readers, 117, 127-28
effective writing, 9-11
time management, 80, 122
See also editing and proofread-
ing; grammar; punctuation
and sentence structure
216
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