Four levels of
essay-writing
Peter Barry uses undergraduate essays on Jane
Eyre to demonstrate how to progress from
description through commentary and discussion
to analysis in your own interpretations of literacy
texts.
There are four basic levels in writing about literature
which can be called:




description
commentary
discussion
analysis
In the following account, these four levels are
distinguished fairly sharply from each other, in order to
make these distinct stages in the development of
writing as clear as possible. They are illustrated by
slightly amended quotations from first-year undergraduate essays on Jane Eyre.
Description
The first quotation illustrates descriptive writing and is
part of a discussion of the early sections of the novel:
Jane is mistreated by the Reed family, and although
she is solely dependent on them to secure her
livelihood she speaks out against her harsh treatment.
This is just a statement of what happens in the book.
It describes events in the narrative. Description of this
kind is obviously of very limited value and can never in
itself secure many marks. It merely indicates that the
writer has read the novel and knows its plot, but there
is no indication of whether anything has been
understood about the significance of the events
depicted. Such writing can be said to be in narrativedescriptive mode: it retells the story, usually sticking to
the order of events in the plot as they occur in the
book.
Commentary
The second quotation from an essay begins in the
same way, but then takes matters a little further: this
quotation illustrates the kind of writing which can be
called commentary:
Jane is mistreated by the Reed family, and although she
is solely dependant on them to secure her livelihood, she
speaks out against her harsh treatment. This shows that
Jane is becoming something which society disapproves
of – a woman with a voice and opinions of her own.
Here, we move from mere description to commentary:
that is, the factual description of what happens at this
stage in the book is supplemented by comments on the
significance of those events. Such comments will
certainly gain marks: yet the commentary here is fairly
limited in scope. Typically, an essay which is written
mainly at this level would go on to cite or describe
several other incidents from the book, each time
attributing more or less the same significance to them.
Hence, the overall structure of such an essay would be
that of a list or a catalogue of cited incidents, none of
them examined closely, and all concluded with variations
on the same statement.
Discussion
Perhaps the limitations of commentary can best be
made apparent by comparing it with the third level,
discussion, which is a more developed treatment of the
same aspect of the novel:
When she protests against her treatment by the Reeds
Jane, of course, engages in a laudable act of rebellion
and self-assertion. But the emphasis of the passage is
not really upon this, but upon the heroine’s realisation of
her own powers, which are tested in this episode for the
first time. (‘What strength had I to dart retaliation at my
antagonist?’ she begins by asking herself.) When she
makes her verbal assault (‘I gathered my energies and
launched them in this blunt sentence’) she is herself
shocked at the force of her own words, as Mrs Reed is
silenced and rebuffed (‘Mrs Reed looked frightened...she
was lifting up her hands...and even twisting her face as if
she would cry’).
Here the essay moves from commentary – which is
essentially a series of more or less isolated points on
some aspect of a book – to discussion, which is made
up of a sequence of points linked together and having a
single focus.
In the passage just quoted, what is said concerns one
aspect of the scene, which is the heroine’s initial sense
of the force of her own personality. This is an underlying
facet of the literary text which the essay picks out and
highlights: if Jane herself had said (for instance, in a
retrospective diary event) that she had been shocked at
the force of her own words, then the writing would be
merely descriptive, since it would simply be repeating
what is already stated in the text. If the writer had
merely praised Jane for her assertiveness, or blamed
her for her failure to restrain her outburst, then the
writing would probably have remained mere
commentary, part of a catalogue in which actions are
approved or disapproved of with reference to a fixed
moral or social point-of-view. What makes the passage
discussion rather than commentary is that it resists
simple closure of that kind, picking up on a less than
obvious facet of the text and then taking time to tease
out its implications in greater detail. If commentary
can be said to pass rapidly over the textual terrain at
high level, flying a predictable course and quickly
moving on elsewhere, then discussion ca be said to
involve doubling back over the territory in question and
moving in for a much closer look.
Analysis
The fourth quotation from the essay moves from
discussion to analysis, taking up the former an
incorporating it into something more wide-ranging.
When she protests against her treatment by the Reeds
Jane, of course, engages in a laudable act of rebellion
and self-assertion. But the emphasis of the passage is
not really upon this, but upon the heroine’s realiasation
of her own powers, which are tested in this episode for
the first time. (‘What strength had I to dart retaliation
at my antagonist?’ she begins by asking herself.)
When she makes her verbal assault (‘I gathered my
energies and launched them in this blunt sentence”)
she is herself shocked at the force of her own words,
as Mrs Reed is silenced and rebuffed (‘Mrs Reed
looked frightened...she was lifting up her hands...and
even twisting her face as if she would cry’).
The outburst here prefigures the moment near the end
of the novel when she again has the undoubted
satisfaction of releasing the full force of her tongue and
telling another person exactly what she thinks of them:
this is the climatic moment when she rejects St John
sentiment you offer; yes St John, and I scorn your idea
of love...I scorn the counterfeit sentiment of your offer;
yes, St John, and I scorn you when you offer it’. In this
later exchange, the matters at issue are the same as
in the scene with Mrs Reed: on both occasions she
refuses to take part in a masquerade of love – ‘I am
not deceitful’, she tells Mrs Reed, ‘if I were I should
say I loved you’ – and on both occasions she resents
the assumption by the other party that she can repress
her feelings in an inhuman way – ‘You think I have no
feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or
kindness’, she says to Mrs Reed. In that sense taking
up St John Rivers’s offer of marriage in adult life would
involve re-imprisoning herself in the red room of Mrs
Reed’s childhood neglect.
This is analytical writing. The main difference between
this and level three writing is that in analysis the
sustained scrutiny of one aspect of a text which is
characteristic of the discussion level is combined with
the establishment of links between that material and
other aspects of the text.
So, in example, there is both detailed discussion of the
early scene in the book, and a series of suggestions
which link that scene with other crucial episodes which
occur later on. Thus, the passage is using the incident
under discussion (Jane’s early treatment by the
Reeds) as a springboard to a series of connections with
other parts of the novel. It is not part of an essay which
simply moves chronologically through the events
depicted in the book (the most common mark of merely
descriptive and commentative writing): rather, it is
establishing its own order, based on underlying thematic
connections, or (to put this differently) on ideas rather
than events.
A list of the other important ‘analytical’ characteristics of
the passage would included the following:
(a) It isn’t just making simple assertions; points are
being qualified, amplified, restated, and this is
indicated by the nature of the connection words and
phrases: ‘of course’, ‘but’, ‘not really’, ‘in that sense’.
(b) The passage has slowed the pace of the discussion:
the writer has paused and homed in on a specific
episode. The episode is being looked at closely, yet
in broad connecting terms too, so that its
implications for the rest of the novel are being tested
out.
(c) The passage is working in close-up with the text,
picking out specific phrases – not quoting huge
chunks, but on the contrary, working mainly at
what might be called ‘phrase level’, where the
sections quoted seldom amount to more than a
single sentence, often the sign of real
engagement in a literary essay.
Conclusion
Of course, there are many different kinds of analytical
writing. Some kinds make use of a sophisticated critical
or theoretical vocabulary, but that is not a prerequisite.
Simple language can express quite complicated ideas.
It is the progress from the basic level of description to
the more advanced techniques of analysis that indicates
genuine ability in critical interpretation of literature.
Peter Barry is Senior Lecturer in English at the
University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is reviews
editor of English (the journal of the English
Association)