Dear Students

We have been receiving some queries about how best of manage these exams,
tutorials, etc and balance the apparently contradictory advice you might be
receiving from the diverse instructor and tutor group. We thought we will put
together some agnostic/instructor-independent guidelines regarding how you
answer an essay well. If you recall, I had shared some material earlier in a mail
titled "How to Read, and How to Write" - from there, Leslie Green's The
Argumentative Essay is criticalreading.
As with every other exercise of articulation, rigour is key. Douglas Adams, the
purveyor of simultaneously remarkable and hilarious ideas, said once - "All
opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust,
sophisticated and well-supported in logic and argument than others." Until
you have convincingly shown, rather than told, your listener or reader why
your argumentation holds up, consider your task incomplete. These general
meditations aside, here is a rough outline of a process you could follow with
some fidelity for fairly certain results:
Some of these may appear to be simplistic or obvious while we contemplate
them as stray thoughts or ideas, but to implement them requires continuous,
strenuous and repetitive practice.
1. Identify the burden of proof:
-- Your first task is to understand the question, rather than the bunch of
ideas it may refer to. If you focus on the latter, your answer usually ends up
being a summary of what different authors have to say about them, sparsely
seasoned with some of your general, unstudied thoughts on these ideas. This
makes for a bad essay because you end up never getting around to answering
the question itself.

-- Once you've read the question carefully, identify what all you need to prove
or disprove for you to have answered the question. This is the core of what
your essay needs to "show".
If we were to take the graded tutorial question, we first need to understand
that we need to show that good citizens choose criticism over exit from the
state. This means I need to show the connection between good citizens and
criticism and I need to show that criticism is preferred over exit and why exit
is a bad option.
2. Identify all "qualifying" or disputed terms:
-- Break down the question into manageable parts with the intention of
identifying all those terms that are disputed and need to be resolved by your
essay. This step will improve upon the first step by focusing your attention
more narrowly/specifically.
Once again taking the essay question, the terms whose meaning needs to be
clarified by your response include - citizen, good citizen, choice of criticism,
choice of exit.
Note that at this stage you haven't yet made up your mind about which way
the question could swing.
In this question, you are to justify why criticism is a better choice than exit,
even though you might think that exit is the appropriate option for a good
citizen. In some questions, the position you need to take in your answer will
be pre-defined, limiting the range of reasons you can engage.
In other questions, it will be left to you to pass judgment upon what you think
is the appropriate response or course of action.

3. Structure your response

-- Organize your answer into "propositions" or statements that you need to
address over the course of your response. These units will form the core pieces
of your argument and your response will validate or invalidate each of these
statements to answer the question before you. These propositions may either
be true or false, and response will try to put this uncertainty at rest.
In the first graded tutorial, your essay would have to answer three questions who is a good citizen? how do we adapt the concepts of exit and voice to
political settings? what is the correlation between notions of good citizenship
and the exercise of voice as an option?
-- Usually (but not necessarily - depending on other constraints like word
limit, the level you can assume your reader to be at, etc), these bricks of your
answers will have four parts:
** Context -

why

this

proposition

is

in

dispute,

what

are

the

circumstances/disputed choices that led to this proposition become relevant.

** Assertion - a straightforward, simple statement that you want to address.
** Reasoning - This will be primarily drawn from two sources:
> authority, which are the texts and readings that have addressed the
questions you are facing. As important as the use of authority is your
assimilation of them. You may usually engage in three processes here - (i)
identify and address the premises and pre-suppositions of their arguments;
(ii) understand the limits of their argument - extend their argument to
settings that they do not immediately contemplate, and validate whether they
continue to hold good or not; (iii) confirm the "integrity" of their
argumentation - do their conclusions follow from the assumptions they lay
out? do they have to?
>> Authorities are important not because they are necessarily right, but
because they uniquely shape the field within which you are operating. Often,
they are part of a long tradition of thinkers who have thought about the

problem much longer, harder and more carefully than you have. Engaging
with them places your argument in context, makes it relevant to those debates,
and importantly, builds on that tradition of thinking about the problem, or
gives you a convincing vantage point to depart from them, discarding them
due to inadequacies in their arguments for reasons well supported in logic.
> logic: begin with a premise or an agreeable or reasonably uncontroversial
base drawn from your assimilation of authorities. Once you have engaged with
the applicability of those authorities to your case, develop arguments from this
premise. A common problem we have observed is that your argumentation
is assertive - which means that you forward a proposition, without saying
anything about what makes it valid, or how it is valid. This must be avoided at
all costs.
>> You

can

forward

reasons

that

are

associated

with

the inherent value or rightness of the proposition - about why it is good, for
reasons separate from the consequences of accepting that proposition. For
example, in your response, you would argue why a good citizen ought not to
exit from the state because there is something about exiting the state that runs
contrary to the idea of being a good citizen.
>> You then go on to consider the consequences of accepting or
discarding the proposition in favour of others. This will allow you to illustrate
why, on balancing these consequences, your proposition may or may not be
valid. For instance, here you will look at what happens when good citizens
choose criticism (how it may lead to a better State), or what happens when
good citizens exit the state instead of criticizing it.
>> Logic is usually deductive or inductive. In the first instance, the
conclusion necessarily has to follow from the premises forwarded. In the
latter, the conclusion may follow from the premises suggested as the reasons
for the conclusion reached. Much of what you have so far been engaging with
in this course is of the latter form. This distinction is not very important for us
in figuring out how to write an essay.
** Examples - These prop up your reasoning and allow your reader to
understand the flow of thought that brought you to your conclusions. They

have

two

important

functions

to illustrate your

argument,

and

to convey more clearly the nature of your argument. Because examples are so
fickle, you need to be very careful about how you use them (refer to previous
mail). In short, make sure that they are sufficiently general. They ought not to
be solipsistic, which means that you should not rely only on your
particular worldview or experiences in support of a general argument. You
should also make sure that the assumptions in your examples are clear and as
few as possible in explaining your argument (if interested, check out Occam's
Razor)
4. Harmonize/Validate
-- Each section of your response will have a descriptive or argumentative
function. Descriptive sections lay out the state of the discipline, and
argumentative sections generally have the structure described in Section 3.
Once you have organized the individual parts of your essay, bring them all
together and make sure that they are complete internally, and in relation to
each other. This means that you should check whether one section in fact
leads to the next section, and whether the sections taken sequentially have the
effect of answering the question posed. This is a reviewing stage. If you find
that your structure doesn't work, rearrange and repeat steps 3 and 4, after
making sure you have not missed anything in steps 1 or 2.
5. Conclude
-- In the concluding section, summarize the conclusions of the individual
sections and tie them up together to indicate what your overall conclusion is.
This section should also capture what the upshot of your argument/paper is,
i.e answer the big "so what, now that you have shown us this?" that remains
after you finish the paper, and indicate the directions that the findings of your
paper can take - are there other similar contexts? does resolving the dilemma
in your paper help figure out some other questions?

6 (disputably). Introduction
-- Some people prefer to start with an introduction, but I think there is a
strong case for writing it after the rest of your paper. You are more likely to
have a sense of the flow of your paper, and understand your conclusion (or,
why it is right) only after you have performed the other tasks rigorously
enough.
-- An introduction should definitely state what your conclusion will be at the
end of the paper. It should also present a listener or reader with an overview
of the structure of your paper, i.e. what all will you show him or her through
your paper, and sketch out some of your own assumptions while writing this
paper.
In all, these six steps should give you a sense of how you can approach an
essay question and answer it well. Fundamentally, it needs you to recognize
that most of the work in writing a response is done before you write it (where
you think about how you want to answer it, what you need to answer, where
you need to look etc.) and after you write it (to review your answer and make
sure you've attended to all the links in the chain of argumentation)
Hope this is useful. As always, write in with feedback and questions.
Best
Badri