Developing Your Essay Writing

Developing Your Essay Writing Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well. The things I've written just for myself are no good. When I run into difficulties, I find I conclude with a few vague questions and then drift off to get a cup of tea. At the very least I must have explained something badly. How was the place different from what they expected? You can ask it of the most unobservant people, and it will extract information they didn't even know they were recording. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. But it took five hundred years before someone thought of casting hilt and blade as one piece. I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. For example, why should there be a connection between humor and misfortune? Why do we find it funny when a character, even one we like, slips on a banana peel? There's a whole essay's worth of surprises there for sure. Do some online research on what other people say about your text (this can be helpful in solidifying the ideas that you’ve already brainstormed). The directions below are representative of what students will encounter on test day. The next step is to understand the English essay structure. For example, how an example highlights certain ideas that you can use to back up your point and answer the question. I didn't notice those things at the time, though. At sixteen I was about as observant as a lump of rock. I can see more now in the fragments of memory I preserve of that age than I could see at the time from having it all happening live, right in front of me. For example, in a recentessay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows who the best programmers are overall. I didn't realize this when I began that essay, and even now I find it kind of weird. I was afraid of flying for a long time and could only travel vicariously. When friends came back from faraway places, it wasn't just out of politeness that I asked what they saw. And I found the best way to get information out of them was to ask what surprised them. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don't change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original. In some cases the writing teachers were transformedin situ into English professors. Francis James Child, who had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English. Among other things, studying history gives one confidence that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Swords evolved during the Bronze Age out of daggers, which had a hilt separate from the blade. Because swords are longer the hilts kept breaking off. In that case, in the course of the conversation I'll be forced to come up a with a clearer explanation, which I can just incorporate in the essay. More often than not I have to change what I was saying as well.