Question

My essays are vague, how can I put this right

Answer 1

This is my saying, which I made up on the spot in giving a workshop for honors students at the LA library: "When you sharpen the tools of expression, you sharpen the tools of perception."

Vague essays come from two evil sources: vague expressions and vague ideas. I think the remedy is to tighten the expressions, but I am a stylist, so I would say that. In truth, it is a synergistic process: the more precise and concrete your expressions, the more definite your ideas will become, and in turn when your ideas are more definite, you can find more concrete expressions.

Suppose you know nothing about carpentry, but you want to write an essay called "On Building a House." Let's say you are not a Google-monkey, so you go out to a Habitat for Humanity site and watch what is happening. At this point, perhaps the best you can write is "Building a house involves nailing boards together."

That is the best you can do. You do not know what a stud, a top plate, a purlin, a rafter, or a fascia board is. The problem is that "boards." It is a very general and vague noun. Now you can gussy it up with strings of adjectives, so you have "short thin vertical boards" and "long thin horizontal boards," and so forth. But that does not help much. You need to know the precise nouns to understand what you are seeing. You may not use the more technical words in your essay for general readers, but you will understand what you are seeing so you can simplify it more precisely.

This is why you may be asked to make sketches if you take botany. When I wrote "the tools of expression" I did not mean merely expression in words. You may hate sketching a flower because you are terrible at drawing. But the idea is not to make you a still-life artist. The idea is that to make even the crudest sketch, you have to see the flower, not merely look at it. Where is the stamen, the ovary, the stigma, the anther? Just think of all the bad poetry about lovely flowers by poets who never know what a flower is!

Naturally this does not apply only to physical descriptions of processes and objects. I will not go further in this vein, because you asked about essays, not fiction.

Getting to better expressions in writing is an endless journey. So here are just two steps to start. Try to get rid of every adverb you can. Using more precise verbs is the way in many cases. Likewise, when you spot a couple of adjectives dragging a limp noun around, try to find a better noun.