The Art of Persuasion1
The purpose of a critical (or argumentative) essay is to communicate a point
from one mind to another. In writing such an essay, you must come up with an idea—
your idea—and you must convincingly prove that idea to others with evidence and
reasoning. That can be difficult, and awareness of the formal elements of a critical
essay can help you through the difficulty. Certainly, in a course that counts for
writing credit you will discuss form, and will work with, and play with, formal
elements. But form in an essay is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is certainly possible to construct an essay formally excellent in every way, and yet completely
devoid of any idea. Such an essay is simply a glorious costume draped over a
headless mannequin. The idea—the point towards which the formal elements work—
is what gives your writing life.
Moreover, every essay has its own style, and follows its own strategy. Thus no
essay should be restricted to the straitjacket of the “five paragraph” format that
consists of a single thesis paragraph listing three points, followed by a single
paragraph for each of those three points, followed by a one-paragraph conclusion.
To fulfill the single purpose of the critical essay—communicating a point to an
audience—you must acknowledge that your audience has specific needs, needs that
the formal elements of the essay work to satisfy. Since your audience needs a reason
to read your essay in the first place, you should provide a sense of occasion at the
beginning of the essay. Since your audience needs to know exactly what you’re
proving, you should provide a sound thesis or controlling idea. Since your audience
needs to know how you plan to support your thesis, you should provide a preview of
this support, a preview that also serves as your projected organization. In the
following developmental paragraphs you should develop in detail the points you
listed in your preview, and in the same order. These paragraphs represent the proof
that your audience will require to be convinced of your position.
Occasion. Your essay might have a great point, but unless you can show your
readers that your point is important to them, it will fall upon deaf ears. Audiences are
essentially selfish; people generally do not have the time or the inclination to read
something that they imagine to be without relevance. Consider all of the times that
you began reading something and never finished because you simply could not
reasonably answer the question “why should I read this?” A strong occasion will
answer that question. Attract readers by showing them that the issue you explore, the
problem you resolve, or the assertion you refute has significance for them. Certainly,
1
Adapted from Dr. Paul Murphy’s “Form and the Essay.”
a powerful occasion can capture an audience. But do not underestimate the
intelligence of your readers; capture them with substance, and not simply with flash.
Thesis. Your thesis is simply a clear statement of what you plan to prove. You
might consider your thesis as your conclusion: not the final words of the essay, of
course, but the outcome of all the thought you have given to your subject.
Therefore, coming up with a thesis is not the first step in writing an essay. Thinking
is. Sometimes, instructors will ask you to submit a thesis paragraph or a thesis
statement, before you submit a full draft. You make a serious mistake, however, if
you assume that you can create a strong thesis without considering the shape, the
intent, and the content of the full draft to follow. Your thesis establishes you as an
authority on a specific subject, and unless you have thought through your subject
thoroughly enough to earn that authority, you almost guarantee that every revision
will start from scratch. You’d be wise to know whether you can prove a point, and to
know exactly how you can prove it, before you commit yourself to proving it, because
a thesis is a commitment—a contract between you and the reader. By stating the
terms of your contract clearly near the outset, you demonstrate that you are well
beyond the stage of “thinking through” a point; you’re showing the audience that you
are ready to prove the point to others. Stating your thesis early in the essay gives both
you and your audience an exact sense of the end you have in mind in the chain of
reasoning that follows. Not providing a thesis, or providing a nebulous thesis,
engenders confusion, not suspense; few people will voluntarily read an essay from
beginning to end with little sense of direction. Give your audience a solid sense of
direction by explicitly stating a thesis to be proved in the body of the essay.
Analysis and argument are central to most critical writing. An analytical thesis
establishes your specific idea about or interpretation of a topic. It promises to teach
your audience something new about your topic—a new perspective, a way of
rethinking a topic. It therefore promises something original: your idea, not a representation of someone else’s interpretation. Generally, for a thesis to be viable it
should meet one or both of the following criteria: (1) it is potentially refutable
(i.e. involves interpretation rather than fact); (2) and/or it explicates something
otherwise obscure (for example: subtle ways in which the visual narrative of a film
complements its verbal narrative). A thesis of the first type, one that is potentially
refutable, often directly engages in controversy by challenging an existing point of
view. A strong critical writer will welcome that challenge, not avoid it. Since such a
“refutational” thesis assumes an opposition, it generally requires the writer to make
clear the nature of the opposition. Ways to achieve this include starting your occasion
with a quote or paraphrase of your opponent’s position.
Preview/projected organization. While your thesis makes clear what point
you are going to prove, your preview/projected organization makes clear to a reader
exactly how you plan to prove the point. To put it simply, you give the reader a sense
of your strategy. A strong preview/projected organization not only sets out your
supporting ideas, but also makes clear the logical connection between those supports
and your thesis. A simple list of points with no logical connection to the thesis hardly
conveys any strategy at all. An effective strategy, on the other hand, demonstrates
that your supports are not miniature essays in themselves, but rather are links in a
chain of logic—links that together establish your thesis.
There are several advantages to projecting a strategy near the beginning of the
essay. For one thing, by substantiating your thesis, you give the reader true
motivation for reading on. If your thesis establishes your authority, your projected
organization confirms it. Moreover, you give your reader a strong sense of where
you’re going in your essay, providing a sense of shape and establishing clear
expectations. Some might object to setting out a projected organization for this
reason, arguing that spelling out a strategy gives away too much—leaving nothing for
the body of the essay. Setting out a line of reasoning, however, is not at all the same
thing as developing it. Your projected organization, like your thesis, simply makes
promises; the rest of the essay fulfills them. If simply stating your supporting ideas
exhausts your thinking on a subject, you don’t know enough to write the essay in the
first place.
Another advantage of projecting a clear strategy is that it will help you, the
writer, know where you’re going. It makes clear to you exactly what you must do—
and, equally important, what you need not do—in developing the essay. And since
your projected organization works as a brief outline, you would be wise to outline
your essay in full before attempting to set out a projected organization.
A final word about the preview/projected organization. Outside of fairy tales,
three is not a magic number. Forcing yourself to work with three supporting points
can often seriously damage your essay, either because you really have only two
points, but struggle to create a third one of dubious relevance, or because you really
have four, or five, or six supporting points, some of which you drop or jam together to
come up with three. In focusing on a specific number of points, you’re likely to lose
sight of the logical connections that unite these points into a strong chain of evidence.
How many supporting points do you need in an essay? That depends completely upon
the thesis you want to prove. Let the thesis shape your essay; don’t distort your essay
to conform to a pre-existing sense of a “correct number” of supporting points.
Developmental paragraphs. In a successful opening to a critical essay,
occasion, thesis, and preview/projected organization—usually, but not always, in that
order—combine into an organic whole. The developmental or body paragraphs of the
essay fulfill the promise of your opening. Keep in mind that if you project a clear
strategy in your introduction, your reader will expect you to keep to it in the body of
the essay. If the two structures—projected and actual—are out of joint, you’ll need to
change one or the other. Moreover, in order to fulfill the demands of the thesis, the
body of your essay must consist of more than data, of more than simply descriptive
facts. A critical essay must contain analysis. You need to explain why the facts you
cite work to prove your thesis. In other words, you need to reason out your points. If
you are writing a refutational essay, as noted above, you need to confront the
opposition directly. There are a number of ways to counter a contrary position in your
developmental paragraphs. You can demonstrate that it is misguided, illogical,
irrelevant, distorted, or somehow otherwise wrong. Or, perhaps, you can show that
what seems to be a contrary view is no impediment to your position. How you
counter a contrary position will depend largely upon your argument. But the
opposition will not go away just because you ignore it.
Conclusion. In concluding an essay, many writers feel trapped between two
equally unpleasant options—simply restating the point of your paper, or setting out
into new territory by stating a new point. The first option can lead to a boring and
perhaps even insulting conclusion: you stated a point and strategy clearly at the start,
you established your point by following your strategy in the body of the essay, and
now—just in case the reader didn’t get it—you repeat at length your thesis and
strategy as your conclusion. One alternative would be to restate the point of your
paper, but only very briefly in the opening sentence or two of the conclusion. For
example: This essay hopes to have explicated how the film Memento draws on
notions of language and its indeterminacy that can be traced back to the ancient
sophists.
What, then, should you do with the rest of your conclusion? To conclude by
stating something completely new could put you in the position of having a
completely new thesis to defend. Consider the following. When you set out a thesis,
you are simply making a promise. By the time you reach the final word of the final
body paragraph, you have kept your promise, by conveying an idea, in full, to your
reader. You’ve earned the right to apply your point. You’ve earned the right to
say that you’ve proved X, and that here’s what proving X should mean to the
reader: here’s how knowing X should force the reader to rethink an act of
Congress, or the state of affairs in Cambodia, or El Niño, or Wuthering Heights,
or whatever. You’ve given the reader a new perspective. End by showing how
the reader can use that new perspective.