Martin Coyle

How to study a Shakespeare play

General Editors Preface - Acknowledgements - How to Approach a Shakespeare Play - STUDYING A HISTORY PLAY - The English History Plays: Richard II and Henry IV Part 1 - The Roman History Plays: Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus - STUDYING A TRAGEDY - The Tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth - STUDYING A COMEDY - The Romantic Comedies: Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing - The Problem Comedies - The Romances - DISCUSSING AN EXTRACT FROM A SHAKESPEARE PLAY - Examinations, Context Questions - Writing about a Longer Extract - WRITING AN ESSAY - Essay-Writing, the Question, your Answer - Further Reading - A List of Shakespeares Plays - Index

Writing a Sentence

This is the chapter you are most likely to skip. The fact that you have bought or borrowed this book shows that you want to improve your writing skills, but the likelihood is that you are looking for advice on how to fine-tune your performance or perhaps for a ‘quick-fix’ solution to a problem. The chances are that you do not want to waste your time reading about something as elementary as ‘a sentence’. Our experience as teachers in a university, however, where students might be expected to be competent writers, has shown us that the most common weakness in students’ writing is the inability to generate sentences that are not only readable and understandable but also grammatically correct in a conventional, formal sense. This is not a new problem; people have always had difficulties handling the basic mechanics of sentences. Part of the reason for this may lie in the sort of technical vocabulary sometimes used to explain the mechanics of language which can be off-putting, although the number of technical terms you actually need to know is very small. The good news, however, is that once the basics of sentence construction are grasped, everything else will fall into place. This is because the sentence is the basis of essay-writing. Indeed, the main thing students need to know is how to construct grammatical sentences. Fortunately, this is a skill that is easy to acquire. Please, therefore, do not skip this chapter. On the contrary, if you are only going to read one chapter of this book, make sure it is this one.

The Well-crafted Sentence

There are a lot of people who know how to construct a sentence, but who, the moment they start to write an essay, get things wrong, producing work that is marred by mistakes or by sentences that do not quite make sense. Why do things go wrong? Why do sentences sometimes read awkwardly and not convey their meaning clearly? One answer to this second question is that the writer has not thought about what he or she wants to say. Indeed, some people argue that provided you think clearly about what you are doing — about the ideas you wish to convey, the information you wish to get across, the argument you wish to develop — then the writing will take care of itself. If you bear in mind the purpose and audience of your work, they suggest, it should be the case that your writing will have direction and coherence.

The Right Word

Writing, as we have said, is a matter of arriving at the right words in the right order. If you can achieve that, at some stage you have crossed the line from writing merely competently to writing with style. For many people, particularly when producing an academic essay, language is merely a kind of wheelbarrow for trundling their ideas around. There comes a point, however, when the reader begins to notice just how well written some essays are (possibly they notice in a negative way, in the sense that they suddenly realise an essay has been effortless to read, that the writer has swept them through the topic with poise and assurance). A great deal of what is involved in writing with style is a matter of following the rules and paying attention to detail; the last two chapters, in particular, have dealt with how to achieve a professional level of structural organisation and polished presentation in your work, and these are important aspects of writing with style. But perhaps the real key lies in the skill with which good writers invariably find the right word and forge the right phrase. It is only with practice that one can achieve such assurance in writing, but in this chapter we try to suggest some of the things to be aware of in making the move from competence to writing with style. We might sum these up as being self-conscious about your grammar, word order and vocabulary, and then taking great care that your work is clear and correct. All of these things will give your work readability and authority. Don’t be fooled by the word ‘style’, however; it doesn’t involve long, elaborate sentences and esoteric vocabulary. The basis of all good writing is the simple, well-constructed sentence serving the needs both of your reader and of your ideas.

Punctuation and Presentation

Success in writing depends upon attention to the overall structure of your work, the topic of the previous chapter, and also attention to detail. That includes making sure that sentences are grammatical and correctly punctuated and spelt, as well as a host of little presentational details that you should strive to get right. Punctuation is one vital aspect of how your work is presented to your reader, but there is something closely related to punctuation, most commonly referred to as the mechanics of presentation. These are conventions rather than absolute rules about writing, but it helps the reader of an essay if your work is presented in accordance with the conventions of an established code.

Spelling and Usage

In this chapter we deal again with the subject of spelling, but we also begin to move on to the broader issue of the appropriate use of words. As we have already pointed out, the rules of English spelling are at times more difficult to remember than learning the words themselves. There is the fall-back of a spell-check on a word-processor, but that should be nothing more than a final check; part of the skill involved in becoming a competent writer is making yourself more aware of words, and that includes knowing how they are spelt. What we do in this chapter is start with a few ruses that people resort to when they are unsure about the spelling of words, and then proceed to the conventions for plurals and hyphens. At the heart of the chapter is a substantial list of words that students (but not just students) frequently spell incorrectly. Then, at the end, we move on to the additional issue of the correct use of words. Often students are unsure whether they should write could of or could have, and equally unsure about the difference between shall and will. It is such matters of usage that we look at in our final section, where we try to steer a common-sense course between formal and colloquial usage.

English, American and Commonwealth literature: a brief survey

Literary criticism is primarily concerned with discussing individual works of literature. The most important thing is to read and reread the books you are studying, trying to decide what they are about and how they work. It is also useful, though, to have some broader ideas and information about literature. In particular, an awareness of the larger context into which any work fits can help you understand the individual text you are studying. There are, in fact, two contexts in which any work can be seen: a generic or genre context, and a historical context.