Ст.п. Радочинская Л.Г.
Херсонский государственный университет,
Украина
AN ANALYTICAL
ESSAY AND ITS PLACE
IN TEACHING
WRITING
Writing essays plays an important role in learning English from
the point of view of language acquisition, extending students’ learning style
and language experience. As a matter of fact EL students benefit from writing
as it helps them memorize the new language and develop mental activity.
Moreover, writing is far more suitable for the students who have difficulty in
presenting their thoughts orally without a preparatory step.
The bulk of an essay can be divided into a few parts: the
introduction, the body of an essay and the final part. The introduction
declares what will be said, then the facts and ideas are presented by way of analysis,
and this part is supplied with conclusions. The introduction of an essay shows
the theme and what is to be expected in the main part which provides in detail,
with description and development of the main facts. In this part we find
statements that support certain ideas and opposing views as they are essential
in revealing the truth. The basic aim of the final part is to draw attention to
the main ideas of the essay and to stress the most important information. Each
part of an essay consists of paragraphs which may be a sentence or a passage
which depends on the intention to focus on the subject briefly or with much
detail.
In writing an analytical essay the student’s aim is to convey
sense of what the text is saying, and how the text creates its meaning – the
use of the various aspects and devices are applied. The simplest way to open an
essay is with a statement of what one has decided the meaning of the text, the
most sufficient interpretation, is. Consequently, the body of an essay is a
presentation of one’s interpretation: you demonstrate the ways in which the
text makes the meaning you believe it to have. In the conclusion students
should sum up their findings or recapitulate their argument briefly, and extend
the significance of their reading if need be – this is where the comment on the
more general, cultural or moral or technical significances of the theme and
techniques of the text is hidden. It is possible to begin an essay in other
ways – by stating what the main barriers are to an interpretation of the text
or what the main difficulties with arriving at an interpretation are, for
instance, and how the reader intends to deal with the text, or by stating what sorts of options he/she has in terms of
emphases and why he/she have chosen that one. It is important to give a sense
of how the students are
proceeding in the essay and why.
There is no unified formula for essay writing. The form which the
essay takes can vary with the nature of the students’ evidence (quotations from
the text or from other sources), with the sense of how the text material is arranged,
with an individual interpretation. Obviously, this is for students to decide
how to make some organizational decisions. Fiction is usually analyzed orally
or in written form by considering one or more aspects of the work in the
categories of theme (ideas, meanings), and/or of fictional techniques (plot,
point of view, etc.).
Writing an analytical essay, students should bear in mind that there
are different kinds of literature in each genre, and different kinds may rely
on different devices. A work of fiction might be allegorical, it might use
magical realism, it might concentrate on the effects of the environment, or it
might attempt metaphorically to represent the interior lives of characters. Thus
to write an effective essay one should figure out what the main devices and
strategies are, and concentrate on them, adding the lesser ones later and not
necessarily in full. It’s worth trying to start with the simplest, most obvious
situation – two persons are meeting, and we add other possible points of
meaning as they seem to extend or illuminate the dramatic situation – for instance a hurricane is approaching
and the meeting is seen from only one person's point of view, each group of
rhymed lines gives a different meaning to what the significance of the meeting
might be. It is necessary to focus on the ‘form’ and the ‘content’, and on the
way how something is said shapes what it means.
Generally speaking, oral and written analysis of fiction has many
similarities to the analysis of poetry. As a rule a work of fiction is a
narrative, with characters, with a setting, told by a narrator, with some ambition
to represent 'the world' in some fashion.
Speaking about the plot it is necessary to mention that a work of
fiction has a certain arrangement of events which are taken to have a relation
to one another. This arrangement of events to some end – for instance to create significance,
raise the level of generality, extend or complicate the meaning – is known as ‘plot’. Narrative is an integral
part of human experience; it is used to make sense out of human experience, to
remember and relate events and significance, and to establish the basic
patterns of character’s behavior. If there is no vivid link of events in a
story or novel meant for analytical essay, the options can be said to be poorly
written or to consider that the lack of relation is thematic, and shows the
varied character of life experience.
To establish significance in narrative there will often be
coincidence, parallel or contrasting episodes, repetitions of various sorts:
the repetition of challenges, crises, episodes, symbols, motifs, etc. The chain
of events in order to create significance is the plot which is to be reflected
throughout an analytical essay.
In the process of creating an analytical essay students should pay
attention to characters in fiction designed to explore certain aspects of human
experience. Characters often depict particular traits of human nature; they may
represent only one or two traits – altruism
or egoism, or they represent very complex clashes, values and feelings; there can
be contrasting or parallel characters, and usually there will be a significance
to the selection of types of characters and to their relationship. On the whole,
the significance of a character can vary from the dramatization of a unique
individual to the most conventional and symbolic and it should be stressed in
the students’ piece of writing.
As for the
setting it may slide from the concrete to the general. As a rule setting
has particular culturally coded significance – a lake or a top of the mountain
has a significance for us different from that of a dirty southern market, and
different situations can be constructed through its use. Settings can be used
in contrasting and comparative ways to add significance, can be repeated all
over again with variations which as well should be depicted in an essay.
A narration requires a person or more to tell the story. This
person or persons will observe events from a certain angle, or point of view, in terms of the
way this person or persons are related to the events and characters. This
person is called a narrator who may be outside the story, telling it objectively;
or a narrator may be a character (or characters) within the story, telling it in
the first person. First-person characters may be trustworthy, telling the truth, seeing things right, or
they may be unreliable. If a
narration by an external narrator carries the reader into the world of a character
in the story, that character is defined as a reflector character; such a character is unaware of the
narration. An external narrator may achieve the narrative by keeping the reader
in a relation of suspense to
the story or in a relation of irony.
The narrator must definitely portrayed in detail in students’ writing.
Still another issue to deal with in an essay is figurative
language; as in any genre, this language tends to be used to characterize the
sensibility and understanding of characters and to establish thematic
significance.
Writing an analytical essay students focus on the fact that fiction
generally claims to show ‘reality’ (this is known as representation or mimesis – imitative representation of the
real world in art and literature) in some way; however, because
any narrative is presented through the symbols and codes of human meaning and
communication systems, fiction cannot represent reality directly, and various
narratives and its forms represent different aspects of reality, and represent
reality in different ways. A narrative might be very concrete and closely connected
with time and place of every-day or routine events; still it may for instance
represent psychological, moral, spiritual or historical aspects through symbols
and characters used representatively or symbolically, hardly probable events,
and other devices. In addition the student in the process of his/her activity should
remember that all narrative requires selection, and therefore it requires
exclusion as well, and it requires devices to put the selected elements of
experience in meaningful relation to each other. Therefore he/she comes back to
such important key elements as coincidence, parallels and opposites,
repetitions, etc.
As narrative represents human experience this or that way and since
it uses cultural codes and language to do so, it should be read and analyzed in
an essay for its structure of values, for its understanding of the world, or
world-view, and for its ideological beliefs, what is assumed to be natural and
proper. Every narrative communication (oral and written) makes claims, often
implicitly, about the nature of the world as the narrator and his or her
cultural traditions understand it to be proper. The kind of writing which is
traditionally called ‘literature’ has a tendency of using cultural codes, human
experience and structuring devices of narrative with a high degree of
intentionality in order to offer a complex understanding of the world. The
astute student-reader of fiction will be aware of the shape of the world that
the fiction projects, the structure of values that underlie the fiction (what
the fiction explicitly claims and what it implicitly claims through its codes
and its ideological understandings); will be aware of the differences and similarities
between the world of the fiction and the world that the reader lives in; and
will be aware of the significances of the selections and exclusions of the
narrative in representing human experience and will give the fullest possible
description in his/her analytical writing.
Литература:
1.
Апресян Ю.В. Англо-русский синонимический
словарь. – М.: Русский язык, 1979.
2.
Арнольд И.В. The English Word. М.:
– Высшая школа,
1973.
3.
Арнольд И.В. Стилистика современного
английского языка. – Ленинград: Просвещение, 1981.
4.
Вавилова М.Г. Обучение пониманию текста при
чтении на иностранном языке во взрослой аудитории. – Москва, 1981.
5.
Hacker D. A Pocket Style Manual. – Bedford / St. Martin’s, Boston, 2004.
6.
Harmer J. How to Teach English. – Edinburgh
Gate, Harlow, England, 1999.