English 20-1 · The critical essay
An argument about a text
The critical essay is not a report on a book. It is a claim you make about a text and then prove from it — and the most common failure is an essay that proves nothing because it spends its length retelling.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. Building a thesis
- 3. Evidence and quotation
- 4. Conventions and correctness
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Thesis, topic and summary are three different things, and mixing them up is what produces a weak essay.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Thesis | An arguable claim the essay sets out to prove. If nobody could reasonably disagree, it is not a thesis. |
| Topic | What you are writing about. A thesis is what you are saying about it. |
| Evidence | Specific material from the text — quotation or precise detail — that supports the claim. |
| Analysis | The explanation of how the evidence supports the claim. This is where the marks are. |
| Embedded quotation | A quotation worked into your own sentence and punctuated as part of it. |
| Literary present | Writing about a text in the present tense: Macbeth kills Duncan. |
| Counter-argument | A reasonable objection, raised and answered. It strengthens an argument only when answered. |
| Matters of Correctness | The scoring category for grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence construction. |
Building a thesis
The idea: A thesis has to be arguable and provable from the text you have. Test it by asking whether someone could sensibly take the other side.
Compare four openings.
- “Macbeth was written by Shakespeare around 1606.” — a fact.
- “This essay will discuss ambition in Macbeth.” — an announcement.
- “Macbeth is a play about ambition.” — a topic.
- “Ambition in Macbeth becomes destructive when it is severed from conscience.” — a thesis: arguable, and it points at the evidence that would prove it.
Choosing a text. Familiarity beats prestige every time. An essay on a short story you know closely will outscore a vague essay on a famous novel you half remember.
Evidence and quotation
The idea: Quote, then explain. The explanation is longer than the quotation, and it is what is being marked.
Embedding forces the point. Writing “Macbeth's description of life as ‘a walking shadow’ reduces a whole existence to something insubstantial and borrowed” makes the claim and the support at once.
Keep quotations short. A phrase you can analyse closely beats four lines you gesture at. Long block quotations eat word count and rarely earn it back.
One point per paragraph. Point, evidence, analysis, link. If a paragraph needs two topic sentences, it is two paragraphs.
Counter-argument. Raise the strongest objection and answer it. An objection raised and left standing hands the reader a reason to disagree with you.
Conventions and correctness
The idea: Matters of Correctness is assessed on its own, and the errors that cost most are the ones a five-minute read-through catches.
| Convention | Rule |
|---|---|
| Tense | Literary present: Macbeth kills Duncan, not killed |
| Titles | Novels and plays in italics; short stories and poems in quotation marks |
| Author | Full name at first mention, surname afterwards |
| Quotations | Embedded and punctuated as part of your sentence |
| Register | Formal, but not inflated — precision beats vocabulary |
Leave five minutes to proofread. Tense slips, missing quotation marks and sentence fragments are the cheapest marks on any exam to give away.
What costs marks
The idea: One of these accounts for more lost marks than the rest together.
- Retelling the plot. Summary shows what happens; analysis shows what it means. This is the single most common weakness at this level.
- Dropping quotations in without explaining them.
- A thesis nobody could disagree with.
- Slipping out of the literary present halfway through.