CCWP05: Making Sense: Perspectives On Interpretation

Elements of the Essay: A Worksheet

The vast majority of the essays you will read, and probably all of those you will be asked to write in an academic context, are arguments. An argument is a discourse addressed, in speech or in writing, by an orator to an audience with the aim of upholding a given thesis. What follows is an attempt to outline some basic elements of academic argument.

I am greatly indebted to Gordon Harvey of the Harvard Writing Program for his original version of the "Elements of the Academic Essay", and I am immensely grateful to my students in Pisa, Italy, for the energy and playfulness with which they reacted to previous versions of this worksheet, opening my eyes to the need for new items, collecting and discussing examples from their academic reading, challenging previous definitions, and generally helping me refine my thinking on this issue. I hope this latest version will be useful to our work together. I am looking forward to your questions and comments.

1. Thesis: Your fundamental idea about a text or topic, and the main proposition that your essay aims to prove. It should not be self-evident but arguable with the means at your disposal and within the scope of your composition, should be stated clearly and govern the whole structure of the essay. Note that the relevance of a thesis is not absolute but structural: the thesis is not necessarily the most interesting or illuminating statement you make in your essay, but the one that is connected to all the other elements and whose presence holds the fabric of the essay together.

2. Arguments: The statements that uphold your thesis or run against its opposite. Their name alone makes it clear that they make up the most important part of any argument: a thesis, no matter how interesting and original, is worth nothing unless it be supported by arguments offering a rational justification for it.

3. Evidence: The data that you refer to, quote or summarize to support you thesis. It must be:

   • pertinent;
   • honestly selected (without disregarding obviously relevant facts or examples);
   • reliable and open to verification.
   Evidence differs from arguments in being drawn directly from reality (pieces of evidence can be attached, included in inverted commas or summarized), while arguments are statements of principle supporting the thesis on a logical or intellectual plane.

4. Analysis: Whatever you do with the evidence to make it unambiguously relevant to your thesis. Please note that quoting or summarizing are not enough: the relationship between the evidence and your thesis is not self-evident to any reader (otherwise someone else would already have written your essay!): it is your responsibility as a writer to make your readers see the evidence as you see it by highlighting important details, revealing hidden connections, and making assumptions explicit so they can find your argument convincing.

5. Sources: Outside support for your argument that you refer to, summarize or quote Any documentation you use in your essay should always be fairly acknowledged and cited so as to make it possible for your readers to double-check it.

6. Motive: The reason why someone (besides your best friend) should be want to read your essay: why your thesis and argument are not only not self-evident but also generally interesting. Of course, criteria for interest vary widely in different audiences; sports papers, fashion magazines and scientific reviews can all assume that their respective audiences will find their articles interesting. Your task is to awaken the interest of an educated general audience, which knows about the issue you are dealing with but has not thought about it as deeply as you have, by showing that your work deserves their attention. One very important value in scientific discourse is originality; the fact that a given experiment has never been carried out before, or that a given connection has never before been spotted, is normally expected to arouse the interest of a specialist audience, as are confutations or corrections of the current opinion ("everybody thinks A to be the case, but I will show that non-A"). But some additions to specialist knowledge, in the words of an illustrious reviewer, do nothing but "fill much-needed gaps", and some corrections are marginal or trivial. The motives that work best are the ones that engage deep-set assumptions and central values of the audience and manage to connect them with the issue at hand.

7. -8. Premisses and assumptions: It would be impossible for the orator and the audience to understand each other if everything had to be debated: communication can only occur if the parties involved already agree on a huge number of things that they are not going to argue about (one of them being the rules of the language they share). Accordingly, every argument rests on a number of premisses, explicit statements that the author assumes the audience to agree about without having to argue for them, and on a much greater number of assumptions, implicit opinions and beliefs about facts, values and the nature of reality. Because the strength of any argument is founded on the acceptance on premisses and assumptions that are always open to debate, no argument, however skilfully costructed and masterfully presented, can ever hope to be universally convincing. We always choose to be persuaded, and this, like any other choice, is one that each of us is morally responsible for.

9. Keywords: Among the most basic foundations of any argument are keywords, the words that express the fundamental ideas and phenomena the essay deals with, refers to, or uses for arguing the thesis. While premisses are generally stated clearly fairly early on and not repeated, keywords recur regularly and play an important role in the audience's perception of the cohesiveness and structure of the argument. It is essential that keywords should be defined unambiguously (eihter by yourself or in the scientific literature you refer to: nobody expects you to provide a new definition of the Holocaust!) and remain constant throughout the argument; never assume your audience shares your idea of the meaning of a keyword you are making up to express a personal intuition, and never replace a keyword with a synonym in order to avoid repetions!

10. Structure: The sequence of the arguments and parts of the essay and the transitions between them. The parts should follow a logical order, and the links in that order should be apparent to the reader; but the order should also be progressive, should develop in a given direction and allow for exploration of the different aspects of a complex topic, not be simply a list of unconnected arguments or pieces of evidence or a series of restatements of the thesis. If an essay is particularly long or complex, the structure may be announced or hinted at in the introduction; it is generally a good idea to map out the structure in advance before setting out to write the essay, though of course you should always retain anough flexibility to change your mind in the face of unforeseen promising developments.

11. Orienting: Pieces of information, explanation and summary providing your readers with enough backgound to follow your argument. Among the most common forms of orienting are:

    • information about some relevant aspects of the main issue given in the introduction;
    • summary of the texts from which excerpts for analysis are taken and
    • context of these excerpts;
    • short introductions of people or events mentioned,
    • and phrases introducing quotations and sources.
    How much and what kind of orienting to include in your essay is a function of your definition of your audience; as a general rule, assume that you are writing for a reader who has some general knowledge of the texts and topic (don't spend time explaining who Jung was, or when the Holocaust happened) but has not reflected about it as much or as deeply as you have.

12. Stitching: Words and phrases that tie together the parts of an argument. Two of the main ways of achieving this aim are a) by using of transition words or phrases indicating the relationship between a section, paragraph or sentence and the ones preceding and following it and b) by referring to an earlier idea or part of the essay either by explicit statement or by echoing and allusion.
13. Title: It should both interest and inform, giving the subject and focus of the essay (it is not enough to refer to the general topic: think about how many articles are written every year about Shakespeare's Hamlet!) and awaking the reader's curiosity; some of the most common rhetorical stratagems used to achieve this aim are the use of paradoxes, memorable sound patterns, or striking phrases from the sources, whose aptness is gradually revealed in the course of the argument. The two functions are often split between title and subtitle, as in the title of this module.

14. Conclusion: The last part of the essay. Its most basic function is to summarize the main results of the argument, emphasizing the connections between them and their relative importance; but it should also represent a new starting point, pointing out the relevance of the argument for the overall issue and containing suggestions for new possible developments.