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production and against  current administrative functions that insist  on indi-
vidual authorship (Womack 48)  but he also celebrates the essay as the best
means of expressing a polemic, including his own, to a wide audience. In fact,
having something to say, an argument, a polemic is crucial; no essay will
succeed if it does not make a case. I have tried to suggest that through your
reading practices and writing your log, for example, you should devote much
of your writing time as a student to activities other than the essay but I have
also insisted that you shouldn t start writing an essay until you have under-
taken these many other activities of reading, research and composition of
arguments. Like Womack, I would encourage academics and students to
undertake different forms of writing and research activity and to work more
collaboratively but I also agree that the essay can have positive functions of
expression; in this chapter we will consider exactly what an essay is and how to
write one.
4.2 What is an essay?
Response
Make notes on exactly what you think an essay is. What does it look like? How
long is it? What kinds of material does it contain? Can an essay be written on
any subject? Where are they written? By whom? What kinds of language and
tone are used?
You probably agree that an essay is a coherent piece of prose writing of
between 1,000 and 5,000 words. (The length probably depends upon which
stage of your degree you are at, with shorter essays at Level 1 and longer ones
in the final year.) They are written on many topics but predominantly found in
schools and universities. They usually answer a question and are composed of
sentences and paragraphs  you d be surprised to find an essay that was written
in verse or as a series of fragments, and, in fact, tutors are often alerted to prob-
lems that the student has had with structure and coherence of argument  or
absence of an argument entirely  from the layout of an essay that is written in
one huge chunk, or conversely, countless isolated sentences. We ve already
stated that an undergraduate essay should have an argument and, as you may
have mentioned, that this argument should be supported with evidence from
texts and experts. It is generally perceived that to give the argument credence it
should be logical and written in a formal register; it should be specific and not
Essays 81
over-generalised. You might reasonably expect an introduction to the essay s
subject and to the way the essay will approach it at the start, and a conclusion
(to the same) at the end. Last but not least, you would expect an essay to be free
from typographical, spelling and punctuation errors.
4.2.1 The five-paragraph essay
In high schools in the US, it is still customary to find that the recommended
essay structure has five parts (similar to those outlined by Corax that we dis-
cussed in the last chapter). Known as the  five-paragraph essay , this document
has only five paragraphs, unsurprisingly: an introduction that sets out the
topic, three paragraphs each with a subtopic that supports the main one, fol-
lowed by a summary that powerfully restates the argument and concludes the
essay. If you search the web for  five-paragraph essay you will find many pages
that use hypertext to state the designated purpose not just of each paragraph
but of every sentence in examples of the five-paragraph essay.
Response
Look at a website that presents the structure of the five-paragraph essay such
as www.geocities.com/soho/Atrium/1437 or www.gc.maricopa.edu/English/
essay/.
Copy or make a plan of the five-paragraph essay. What are the strengths of
this formula? What are its weaknesses? How does it build an argument? What
is missing from the content of this type of essay? Have you ever written an
essay to such a tightly structured plan?
Although school students in the US are examined on their ability to write a
five-paragraph essay, its raison d être is purportedly to give practice in basic
writing skills that will lead to future success in more varied forms. Detractors
feel, however, that writing to rule in this way is more likely to discourage
imaginative writing and thinking than enable it. The five-paragraph essay is
especially suited to what are known as expository and narrative rather than
argument essays, that is, essays that simply describe something rather than make
a case. You may have noticed in your analysis that, unlike Corax s tabulation, the
five-paragraph essay utilises only supporting evidence. It does not include the
material or argument that develop a critique of the main premise and that are
demanded in the five canons of rhetoric or perhaps in a more sophisticated [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]