In the moments when my brain isn’t working very well (of which there are quite a few in the current situation), I’m going to start typing up a few bits of advice that I commonly give to undergrads, postgrads, and even colleagues.
We’re still in essay-writing season here, so the first one is on: writing a good introduction.
This is aimed primarily at the shortish undergraduate essay in English Literature and cognate disciplines but might also be useful to others.
Remember that this is just one way of writing an introduction – chat with your tutors about it, too.
For a 2500-3000 word undergraduate essay I’d expect this to be around three quarters of a page, although again this isn’t a hard and fast rule. For a shorter essay you’ll probably need a brisker introduction; for a longer essay or dissertation you might be doing some of this in more extended form over a few paragraphs.
While you’ll always want to get something down for an introduction early in your writing process, you should also revise it at the end when you’re certain what you’re saying in the essay below.
- Punchy opening statement
This needs to say something particular about your argument in the essay that’s going to follow, addressing some of the key terms. It needs to go beyond sweeping historical generalisations: I was told as an undergrad, back in the Dark Ages, that if you wrote something along the lines of “the nineteenth century was an age of great change”, you’d never get above a 2:2. While I don’t think that’s necessarily true, it is worth thinking about how you can be as specific as possible! To follow through from that example, if you’re claiming that there was a change, what’s the nature of that? Is it about something specific in terms of politics, gender, sexuality, race, literary narrative, form, or another concept? How dramatic was the change? Was it solely positive or negative, or were the gains and losses?
- An eye-catching quotation
And here I mean the best, really the most magical, the quotation from a primary text or a historical or critical source that absolutely sums up everything that you want to say in the essay, or says it in a really vivid way.
Make sure that you speak back to this quotation in your own words. It’d be a good idea to use your response to this quotation to nuance your opening statement and develop your ideas further. Can you use a quotation like this to define your understanding of the key term, perhaps?
- Identify your text(s) and why they resonate
What does the text that you’ve chosen have to say about your overall point? Is it in line with what’s happening in the bigger picture? Does it align in some ways but not in others? Or is it a counterexample to a prevailing trend?
If your essay is on more than one text, what do we gain by reading these together? Are they similar? Subtly different? Wildly different and showing a range of opinions/positions? You could perhaps slip in another really good short quotation from a primary text here if you haven’t done so above.
- State the order/structure of your essay
We call this signposting, and it helps the person reading/marking your work to understand where the essay will go. Is your essay organised by theme/topic, or by text, or a combination of the two? How do those two things interlink? Do you discuss some theory/context before moving on to discuss textual examples by text/theme? Make this final statement clear and direct.
Obviously this is only one way that you can do this – there are often compelling reasons to do something different depending on the context. But I think this is a pretty reliable guide to things to include, and I would generally start by doing them in this order.
Happy essay writing!
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