writing notes on essay

Essay Writing: A complete guide for students and teachers

P LANNING, PARAGRAPHING AND POLISHING: FINE-TUNING THE PERFECT ESSAY

Essay writing is an essential skill for every student. Whether writing a particular academic essay (such as persuasive, narrative, descriptive, or expository) or a timed exam essay, the key to getting good at writing is to write. Creating opportunities for our students to engage in extended writing activities will go a long way to helping them improve their skills as scribes.

But, putting the hours in alone will not be enough to attain the highest levels in essay writing. Practice must be meaningful. Once students have a broad overview of how to structure the various types of essays, they are ready to narrow in on the minor details that will enable them to fine-tune their work as a lean vehicle of their thoughts and ideas.

In this article, we will drill down to some aspects that will assist students in taking their essay writing skills up a notch. Many ideas and activities can be integrated into broader lesson plans based on essay writing. Often, though, they will work effectively in isolation – just as athletes isolate physical movements to drill that are relevant to their sport. When these movements become second nature, they can be repeated naturally in the context of the game or in our case, the writing of the essay.

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Planning an essay

The Boys Scouts’ motto is famously ‘Be Prepared’. It’s a solid motto that can be applied to most aspects of life; essay writing is no different. Given the purpose of an essay is generally to present a logical and reasoned argument, investing time in organising arguments, ideas, and structure would seem to be time well spent.

Given that essays can take a wide range of forms and that we all have our own individual approaches to writing, it stands to reason that there will be no single best approach to the planning stage of essay writing. That said, there are several helpful hints and techniques we can share with our students to help them wrestle their ideas into a writable form. Let’s take a look at a few of the best of these:

BREAK THE QUESTION DOWN: UNDERSTAND YOUR ESSAY TOPIC.

Whether students are tackling an assignment that you have set for them in class or responding to an essay prompt in an exam situation, they should get into the habit of analyzing the nature of the task. To do this, they should unravel the question’s meaning or prompt. Students can practice this in class by responding to various essay titles, questions, and prompts, thereby gaining valuable experience breaking these down.

Have students work in groups to underline and dissect the keywords and phrases and discuss what exactly is being asked of them in the task. Are they being asked to discuss, describe, persuade, or explain? Understanding the exact nature of the task is crucial before going any further in the planning process, never mind the writing process .

BRAINSTORM AND MIND MAP WHAT YOU KNOW:

Once students have understood what the essay task asks them, they should consider what they know about the topic and, often, how they feel about it. When teaching essay writing, we so often emphasize that it is about expressing our opinions on things, but for our younger students what they think about something isn’t always obvious, even to themselves.

Brainstorming and mind-mapping what they know about a topic offers them an opportunity to uncover not just what they already know about a topic, but also gives them a chance to reveal to themselves what they think about the topic. This will help guide them in structuring their research and, later, the essay they will write . When writing an essay in an exam context, this may be the only ‘research’ the student can undertake before the writing, so practicing this will be even more important.

RESEARCH YOUR ESSAY

The previous step above should reveal to students the general direction their research will take. With the ubiquitousness of the internet, gone are the days of students relying on a single well-thumbed encyclopaedia from the school library as their sole authoritative source in their essay. If anything, the real problem for our students today is narrowing down their sources to a manageable number. Students should use the information from the previous step to help here. At this stage, it is important that they:

●      Ensure the research material is directly relevant to the essay task

●      Record in detail the sources of the information that they will use in their essay

●      Engage with the material personally by asking questions and challenging their own biases

●      Identify the key points that will be made in their essay

●      Group ideas, counterarguments, and opinions together

●      Identify the overarching argument they will make in their own essay.

Once these stages have been completed the student is ready to organise their points into a logical order.

WRITING YOUR ESSAY

There are a number of ways for students to organize their points in preparation for writing. They can use graphic organizers , post-it notes, or any number of available writing apps. The important thing for them to consider here is that their points should follow a logical progression. This progression of their argument will be expressed in the form of body paragraphs that will inform the structure of their finished essay.

The number of paragraphs contained in an essay will depend on a number of factors such as word limits, time limits, the complexity of the question etc. Regardless of the essay’s length, students should ensure their essay follows the Rule of Three in that every essay they write contains an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Generally speaking, essay paragraphs will focus on one main idea that is usually expressed in a topic sentence that is followed by a series of supporting sentences that bolster that main idea. The first and final sentences are of the most significance here with the first sentence of a paragraph making the point to the reader and the final sentence of the paragraph making the overall relevance to the essay’s argument crystal clear. 

Though students will most likely be familiar with the broad generic structure of essays, it is worth investing time to ensure they have a clear conception of how each part of the essay works, that is, of the exact nature of the task it performs. Let’s review:

Common Essay Structure

Introduction: Provides the reader with context for the essay. It states the broad argument that the essay will make and informs the reader of the writer’s general perspective and approach to the question.

Body Paragraphs: These are the ‘meat’ of the essay and lay out the argument stated in the introduction point by point with supporting evidence.

Conclusion: Usually, the conclusion will restate the central argument while summarising the essay’s main supporting reasons before linking everything back to the original question.

ESSAY WRITING PARAGRAPH WRITING TIPS

●      Each paragraph should focus on a single main idea

●      Paragraphs should follow a logical sequence; students should group similar ideas together to avoid incoherence

●      Paragraphs should be denoted consistently; students should choose either to indent or skip a line

●      Transition words and phrases such as alternatively , consequently , in contrast should be used to give flow and provide a bridge between paragraphs.

HOW TO EDIT AN ESSAY

Students shouldn’t expect their essays to emerge from the writing process perfectly formed. Except in exam situations and the like, thorough editing is an essential aspect in the writing process. 

Often, students struggle with this aspect of the process the most. After spending hours of effort on planning, research, and writing the first draft, students can be reluctant to go back over the same terrain they have so recently travelled. It is important at this point to give them some helpful guidelines to help them to know what to look out for. The following tips will provide just such help: 

One Piece at a Time: There is a lot to look out for in the editing process and often students overlook aspects as they try to juggle too many balls during the process. One effective strategy to combat this is for students to perform a number of rounds of editing with each focusing on a different aspect. For example, the first round could focus on content, the second round on looking out for word repetition (use a thesaurus to help here), with the third attending to spelling and grammar.

Sum It Up: When reviewing the paragraphs they have written, a good starting point is for students to read each paragraph and attempt to sum up its main point in a single line. If this is not possible, their readers will most likely have difficulty following their train of thought too and the paragraph needs to be overhauled.

Let It Breathe: When possible, encourage students to allow some time for their essay to ‘breathe’ before returning to it for editing purposes. This may require some skilful time management on the part of the student, for example, a student rush-writing the night before the deadline does not lend itself to effective editing. Fresh eyes are one of the sharpest tools in the writer’s toolbox.

Read It Aloud: This time-tested editing method is a great way for students to identify mistakes and typos in their work. We tend to read things more slowly when reading aloud giving us the time to spot errors. Also, when we read silently our minds can often fill in the gaps or gloss over the mistakes that will become apparent when we read out loud.

Phone a Friend: Peer editing is another great way to identify errors that our brains may miss when reading our own work. Encourage students to partner up for a little ‘you scratch my back, I scratch yours’.

Use Tech Tools: We need to ensure our students have the mental tools to edit their own work and for this they will need a good grasp of English grammar and punctuation. However, there are also a wealth of tech tools such as spellcheck and grammar checks that can offer a great once-over option to catch anything students may have missed in earlier editing rounds.

Putting the Jewels on Display: While some struggle to edit, others struggle to let go. There comes a point when it is time for students to release their work to the reader. They must learn to relinquish control after the creation is complete. This will be much easier to achieve if the student feels that they have done everything in their control to ensure their essay is representative of the best of their abilities and if they have followed the advice here, they should be confident they have done so.

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• Essay Writing

Introduction

In the simplest terms, an essay is a short piece of writing which is set around a specific topic or subject. The piece of writing will give information surrounding the topic but will also display the opinions and thoughts of the author. Oftentimes, an essay is used in an academic sense by way of examination to determine whether a student has understood their studies and as a way of testing their knowledge on a specific subject. An essay is also used in education as a way of encouraging a student to develop their writing skills.

Moreover; an essay is a focused piece of writing designed to inform or persuade. There are many different types of essays, but they are often defined in four categories: argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays. Argumentative and expository essays are focused on conveying information and making clear points, while narrative and descriptive essays are about exercising creativity and writing in an interesting way. At the university level, argumentative essays are the most common type. 

Types of Essay Writing

When it comes to writing an essay, there is not simply one type, there are, quite a few types of essay, and each of them has its purpose and function which are as follows:

Narrative Essays

A narrative essay details a story, oftentimes from a particular point of view. When writing a narrative essay, you should include a set of characters, a location, a good plot, and a climax to the story. It is vital that when writing this type of essay you use fine details which will allow the reader to feel the emotion and use their senses but also give the story the chance to make a point. 

Descriptive Essay

A descriptive essay will describe something in great detail. The subject can be anything from people and places to objects and events but the main point is to go into depth. You might describe the item’s color, where it came from, what it looks like, smells like, tastes like, or how it feels. It is very important to allow the reader to sense what you are writing about and allow them to feel some sort of emotion whilst reading. That being said, the information should be concise and easy to understand, the use of imagery is widely used in this style of essay. 

Expository Essay

An expository essay is used as a way to look into a problem and therefore compare it and explore it. For the expository essay, there is a little bit of storytelling involved but this type of essay goes beyond that. The main idea is that it should explain an idea giving information and explanation. Your expository essay should be simple and easy to understand as well as give a variety of viewpoints on the subject that is being discussed. Often this type of essay is used as a way to detail a subject which is usually more difficult for people to understand, clearly and concisely.

Argumentative Essay

When writing an argumentative essay, you will be attempting to convince your reader about an opinion or point of view. The idea is to show the reader whether the topic is true or false along with giving your own opinion. You must use facts and data to back up any claims made within the essay. 

Format of Essay Writing

Now there is no rigid format of an essay. It is a creative process so it should not be confined within boundaries. However, there is a basic structure that is generally followed while writing essays.

This is the first paragraph of your essay. This is where the writer introduces his topic for the very first time. You can give a very brief synopsis of your essay in the introductory paragraph. Generally, it is not very long, about 4-6 lines. 

This is the main crux of your essays. The body is the meat of your essay sandwiched between the introduction and the conclusion. So the most vital content of the essay will be here. This need not be confined to one paragraph. It can extend to two or more paragraphs according to the content.

This is the last paragraph of the essay. Sometimes a conclusion will just mirror the introductory paragraph but make sure the words and syntax are different. A conclusion is also a great place, to sum up, a story or an argument. You can round up your essay by providing some morals or wrapping up a story. Make sure you complete your essays with the conclusion, leave no hanging threads.

Writing Tips

Give your essays an interesting and appropriate title. It will help draw the attention of the reader and pique their curiosity

 Keep it between 300-500 words. This is the ideal length, you can take creative license to increase or decrease it

 Keep your language simple and crisp. Unnecessary complicated and difficult words break the flow of the sentence.

 Do not make grammar mistakes, use correct punctuation and spelling five-paragraph. If this is not done it will distract the reader from the content

  Before beginning the essay, organize your thoughts and plot a rough draft. This way you can ensure the story will flow and not be an unorganized mess.

Understand the Topic Thoroughly-Sometimes we jump to a conclusion just by reading the topic once and later we realize that the topic was different than what we wrote about.  Read the topic as many times as it takes for you to align your opinion and understanding about the topic.

Make Pointers-It is a daunting task to write an essay inflow as sometimes we tend to lose our way of explaining and get off-topic, missing important details. Thinking about all points you want to discuss and then writing them down somewhere helps in covering everything you hoped to convey in your essay.

Develop a Plan and Do The Math-Essays have word limits and you have to plan your content in such a way that it is accurate, well-described, and meets the word limit given. Keep a track of your words while writing so that you always have an idea of how much to write more or less. 

Essays are the most important means of learning the structure of writing and presenting them to the reader.

FAQs on Essay Writing

1. Writing an Essay in a format is important?

Yes, it is important because it makes your content more streamlined and understandable by the reader. A set format gives a reader a clear picture of what you are trying to explain. It also organises your own thoughts while composing an essay as we tend to think and write in a haphazard manner. The format gives a structure to the writeup.

2. How does Essay writing improve our English?

Essay writing is a very important part of your English earning curriculum, as you understand how to describe anything in your words or how to put your point of view without losing its meaning

3.  How do you write a good essay?

Start by writing a thorough plan. Ensure your essay has a clear structure and overall argument. Try to back up each point you make with a quotation. Answer the question in your introduction and conclusion but remember to be creative too.

4.  What is the format of writing an essay?

A basic essay consists of three main parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. This basic essay format will help you to write and organize an essay. However, flexibility is important. While keeping this basic essay format in mind, let the topic and specific assignment guide the writing and organization.

5.  How many paragraphs does an essay have?

The basic format for an essay is known as the five paragraph essay – but an essay may have as many paragraphs as needed. A five-paragraph essay contains five paragraphs. However, the essay itself consists of three sections: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Below we'll explore the basics of writing an essay.

6.  Can you use the word you in an essay?

In academic or college writing, most formal essays and research reports use third-person pronouns and do not use “I” or “you.” An essay is the writer's analysis of a topic.  “You” has no place in an essay since the essay is the writer's thoughts and not the reader's thoughts.

7.  What does bridge mean in an essay?

A bridge sentence is a special kind of topic sentence. In addition to signaling what the new paragraph is about, it shows how that follows from what the old paragraph said. The key to constructing good bridges is briefly pointing back to what you just finished saying.

Student Note-Taking: Level Up Your Essay Writing

Follow this real life example of how students can write their essays much easier and faster with Scrintal, a free tool used by top students and visual thinkers.

Become a Visual Thinker

Introduction | A Student’s Perspective

As an undergraduate student with a minor in the social sciences, I’ve written my fair share of essays. I see the value in outlining, but the way I’ve learned to do it in school forces me to compartmentalize my thoughts into strict categories, and it’s harder to make connections between points without filling up the margins with messy written notes or adding asterisks and typing footnotes. Without these visual reminders, my head is swimming with ideas and it’s difficult to focus on the topic at hand.  

Even in cases where I’m writing an essay about which I’m not bursting with ideas, sitting in front of a blank document with nowhere to start is a daunting feeling that doesn’t inspire creativity or ideation. I’ve often been known to fill up a flashcard full of keywords and phrases that relate to my essay topic and can be referred to while I write.

But there’s a better solution now.

Planning | How To Plan Essay Writing With Scrintal

Before Scrintal, my essay-writing process depended on the length and topic of the paper. I would start with reading the source material, usually consisting of one or many philosophy papers that varied in complexity from op-eds to intricate and meandering textbook chapters. 

Hume and Marx were always easy reads if you could pay attention, and to write a thousand-word paper on them would be a breeze. I would start with a cheeky first sentence and from there I could write in an ordered fashion and edit along the way. A final read-through before submitting and I was done; these essays received good marks, because they started with a single source, relied on a single thesis statement, and referenced materials that were concise, well-organized, and simple to understand. 

Kierkegaard and Heidegger, on the other hand, were more complex. After a lot of Googling questions, skimming Wikipedia, and taking breaks from reading to lean back in my chair and ponder the last sentence, I could grasp the basic concept of a difficult paper. But explaining it in full, much less writing an original paper, was a whole different story. I struggled through these and made it out the other side, but it was inefficient and sometimes uninspired; I would feel like all the ideas I came up with while reading had been lost along the way in my quest to understand the next sentence, and the one after that, and the one after that. 

Scrintal changed that: I’ve written two essays using Scrintal, one being a relatively short paper that required comparing two sources and another ten-pager for which I referenced three lengthy academic articles and one 400-page book.

For the comparison paper, I wrote notes on Scrintal as I read and highlighted in OneNote, creating connecting cards about similar ideas between the two papers as well as counterarguments. I only had to read each paper one time to articulate my ideas, and I didn’t have to write in the OneNote margins to explain my highlights; I only highlighted so I could remember which sentences to quote. This significantly cut down my ideation time and ensured I didn’t have to reread material, the latter of which always used to make me feel too entrenched in the source to be able to step back and write about it in my own words.

For the second ten-page essay, I read through sources and added cards to denote different ideas, easily connecting them to one other by linking cards. I added quotes directly from sources into my cards and each card represented a different argument in support of my thesis. Because the paper was longer and more complex, I did return to my sources to verify that the points I made were correctly described; but rather than verifying my entire paper sentence by sentence, I was able to parse through cards and make connections as they appeared, ensuring that my spontaneous ideas were not lost along the way. 

Since the writing of these essays, a new Scrintal update also allows the user to link to an online PDF file in their card and open the document in a new window alongside their card, which makes the process of writing while reading even easier. You can also do this with YouTube videos to listen and type at the same time. A great feature to add would be the ability to upload PDFs and other documents as well as videos (like downloadable lecture videos from online classes) with the same results rather than having to link PDFs available from online sources.

You can also now tag cards or change their color, which I would have used to differentiate cards based on whether they represent ideas, arguments, or entire reference summaries. These tools will definitely come into play in my future uses.

Based on my experience, my favorite Scrintal planning features are as follows:

Flexibility of creating and marking notecards for different essay components

Ability to easily connect ideas between cards in order to remember where they are relevant

Search function, which allows me to clear my desk of cards that are not immediately needed and bring them back as required

Ability to open documents and videos in a separate window within the Scrintal ecosystem to avoid switching between different tabs

Folding and expanding cards to see the big picture of a paper and ensure everything I need to address is included in my ideas

Ideation in essay writing is the most difficult part for me. Once I know what I need to write about, the writing itself is easy; and the flow of writing is much smoother when it’s not interrupted by having to think about where to go next. Instead, my thought process and direction are easily laid out in the connected cards.

Writing | How To Write An Essay Using Scrintal

Before Scrintal, writing was either a putting-to-paper of my stream of consciousness or a laborious and frustrating ordeal, again depending on the length and topic of the essay. But the main function of Scrintal for essays is the planning, and once this is done, writing is as simple as adding more detail and transforming ideas into coherent, meaningful sentences. Even if I don’t know exactly the order in which I want to write a paper when I begin, I can collapse my notes all at once to see all the components of my thesis and decide which naturally comes after the one before. I was even able to copy and paste phrases directly from Scrintal into my essay with few changes; because these ideas were written while I was in the throes of reading, they were my first and best attempts at synthesizing what I had read in my own words and could function as efficient explanatory or introductory phrases in the paper itself. I would not have been able to do this if my ideas were written down after I had finished reading the whole source material, but since I wrote while I read, the ideas were fresh in my mind and well-articulated in my notecard.

Conclusion | The Future of Essay Writing

My experience with the early rendition of Scrintal improved my ideation, efficiency, and attitude when it came to writing essays. Having seen the new improvements in available tools and user experience, I see this continuing to be the case. Any concerns I had while completing these two essays have since been mostly resolved: namely, I no longer have to switch between tabs to write notes while reading or listening if the PDF or video is available online, nor is it necessary to have all cards in the same color or always view all cards and their content rather than the card titles alone. 

Scrintal could not have come at a better time, because I am currently in the process of writing my undergraduate thesis, an extensive term-long assignment that is largely self-directed and requires diligent documentation of ideas. While my high school education prepared me to write essays with surprise prompts under time constraints, Scrintal allows me to formulate well-researched and thoughtfully planned papers with ease. I can choose when to focus on an idea and when to step back and see the progress of my research. I can decide when to clear my desk and when to bring everything back into the picture. I can easily explore a new idea and the substance behind it, even deleting it or moving the information to an existing card if needed. The team behind this tool values user feedback and has implemented it faster than any other company I have seen; so I have no doubt that any potential improvements will make it to my desk and further enhance my experience. 

The future of my writing is Scrintal, and I’m not going back.

Isha Trivedi

Essay Topics – List of 500+ Essay Writing Topics and Ideas

List of 500+ essay writing topics and ideas.

Essay topics in English can be difficult to come up with. While writing essays , many college and high school students face writer’s block and have a hard time to think about topics and ideas for an essay. In this article, we will list out many good essay topics from different categories like argumentative essays, essays on technology, environment essays for students from 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th grades. Following list of essay topics are for all – from kids to college students. We have the largest collection of essays. An essay is nothing but a piece of content which is written from the perception of writer or author. Essays are similar to a story, pamphlet, thesis, etc. The best thing about Essay is you can use any type of language – formal or informal. It can biography, the autobiography of anyone. Following is a great list of 100 essay topics. We will be adding 400 more soon!

But Before that you may wanna read some awesome Essay Writing Tips here .

Get the Huge list of 100+ Speech Topics here

Argumentative Essay Topics

• Should plastic be banned?
• Pollution due to Urbanization
• Education should be free
• Should Students get limited access to the Internet?
• Selling Tobacco should be banned
• Smoking in public places should be banned
• Facebook should be banned
• Students should not be allowed to play PUBG

Essay Topics on Technology

• Wonder Of Science
• Mobile Phone

Essay Topics on Festivals on Events

• Independence Day (15 August)
• Teachers Day
• Summer Vacation
• Children’s Day
• Swachh Bharat Abhiyan
• Janmashtami
• Republic Day

Essay Topics on Education

• Education Essay
• Importance of Education
• Contribution of Technology in Education

Essay Topics on Famous Leaders

• Mahatma Gandhi
• APJ Abdul Kalam
• Jawaharlal Nehru
• Swami Vivekananda
• Mother Teresa
• Rabindranath Tagore
• Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
• Subhash Chandra Bose
• Abraham Lincoln
• Martin Luther King
• Lal Bahadur Shashtri

Essay Topics on Animals and Birds

• My Favorite Animal

Essays Topics About Yourself

• My Best Friend
• My Favourite Teacher
• My Aim In Life
• My Favourite Game – Badminton
• My Favourite Game – Essay
• My Favourite Book
• My Ambition
• How I Spent My Summer Vacation
• India of My Dreams
• My School Life
• I Love My Family
• My Favourite Subject
• My Favourite Game Badminton
• My Father My Hero
• My School Library
• My Favourite Author
• My plans for summer vacation

Essay Topics Based on Environment and Nature

• Global Warming
• Environment
• Air Pollution
• Environmental Pollution
• Water Pollution
• Rainy Season
• Climate Change
• Importance Of Trees
• Winter Season
• Deforestation
• Natural Disasters
• Save Environment
• Summer Season
• Trees Our Best Friend Essay In English

Essay Topics Based on Proverbs

• Health Is Wealth
• A Stitch in Time Saves Nine
• An Apple a Day Keeps Doctor Away
• Where there is a will, there is way
• Time and Tide wait for none

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Essay Topics for Students from 6th, 7th, 8th Grade

• Noise Pollution
• Environment Pollution
• Women Empowerment
• Time and Tide Wait for none
• Science and Technology
• Importance of Sports
• Sports and Games
• Time Management
• Cleanliness is next to Godliness
• Cleanliness
• Rome was not Built in a Day
• Unemployment
• Clean India
• Cow Essay In English
• Describe Yourself
• Festivals Of India
• Ganesh Chaturthi
• Healthy Food
• Importance Of Water
• Plastic Pollution
• Value of Time
• Honesty is the Best Policy
• Gandhi Jayanti
• Human Rights
• Knowledge Is Power
• Same Sex Marriage
• Childhood Memories
• Cyber Crime
• Kalpana Chawla
• Punctuality
• Rani Lakshmi Bai
• Spring Season
• Unity In Diversity
• Artificial Intelligence
• Online Shopping
• Indian Culture
• Healthy Lifestyle
• Indian Education System
• Disaster Management
• Environmental Issues
• Freedom Fighters
• Grandparents
• Save Fuel For Better Environment
• Importance Of Newspaper
• Lal Bahadur Shastri
• Raksha Bandhan
• World Environment Day
• Narendra Modi
• What Is Religion
• Charity Begins at Home
• A Journey by Train
• Ideal student
• Save Water Save Earth
• Indian Farmer
• Safety of Women in India
• Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
• Capital Punishment
• College Life
• Natural Resources
• Peer Pressure
• Nature Vs Nurture
• Romeo And Juliet
• Generation Gap
• Makar Sankranti
• Constitution of India
• Girl Education
• Importance of Family
• Importance of Independence Day
• Brain Drain
• A Friend In Need Is A Friend Indeed
• Action Speaks Louder Than Words
• All That Glitters Is Not Gold
• Bhagat Singh
• Demonetization
• Agriculture
• Importance of Discipline
• Population Explosion
• Poverty in India
• Uses Of Mobile Phones
• Water Scarcity
• Train Journey
• Land Pollution
• Environment Protection
• Indian Army
• Uses of Internet
• All that Glitters is not Gold
• Balanced Diet
• Blood Donation
• Digital India
• Dussehra Essay
• Energy Conservation
• National Integration
• Railway Station
• Sachin Tendulkar
• Health And Hygiene
• Importance Of Forest
• Indira Gandhi
• Laughter Is The Best Medicine
• Career Goals
• Mental Health
• Save Water Save Life
• International Yoga Day
• Winter Vacation
• Soil Pollution
• Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining
• Indian Culture And Tradition
• Unity Is Strength
• Unity is Diversity
• Wildlife Conservation
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Notes on Writing a Novel

Plot. — Essential. The Pre-Essential. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.

He is forced towards his plot. By what? By the ‘what is to be said.’ What is ‘what is to be said’? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated—impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else— x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move till its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.

Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action.

Plot is story. It is also ‘a story’ in the nursery sense = lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.

Action by whom? The Characters (see       characters ). Action in view of what, and because of what? The ‘what is to be said.’

What about the idea that the function of action is to express the characters? This is wrong. The characters are there to provide the action. Each character is created, and must only be so created, as to give his or her action (or rather, contributory part in the novel’s action) verisimilitude.

What about the idea that plot should be ingenious, complicated—a display of ingenuity remarkable enough to command attention? If more than such a display, what? Tension, or mystification towards tension, are good for emphasis. For their own sakes, bad.

Plot must further the novel towards its object. What object? The non-poetic statement of a poetic truth.

Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.

Plot, story, is in itself un-poetic. At best it can only be not anti-poetic. It cannot claim a single poetic license. It must be reasoned—onward from the moment when its none-otherness, its only-possibleness has become apparent. Novelists must always have one foot, sheer circumstantiality, to stand on, whatever the other foot may be doing. ( N.B. —Much to be learnt from story-telling to children. Much to be learnt from the detective story—especially non-irrelevance. (See      relevance .) )

Flaubert’s ‘Il faut interésser.’ Stress on manner of telling: keep in mind, ‘I will a tale unfold. ’ Interest of watching silk handkerchief drawn from conjuror’s watch.

Plot must not cease to move forward. (See      advance .) The actual speed of the movement must be even. Apparent variations in speed are good, necessary, but there must be no actual variations in speed. To obtain those apparent variations is part of the illusion-task of the novel. Variations in texture can be made to give the effect of variations in speed. Why are apparent variations in speed necessary? (a) For emphasis. (b) For non-resistance, or ‘give,’ to the nervous time-variations of the reader. Why is actual evenness, non-variation, of speed necessary? For the sake of internal evenness for its own sake. Perfection of evenness = perfection of control. The evenness of the speed should be the evenness inseparable from tautness. The tautness of the taut string is equal (or even) all along and at any part of the string’s length.

Are the characters , then, to be constructed to formula—the formula pre-decided by the plot? Are they to be drawn, cut out, jointed, wired, in order to be manipulated for the plot?

No. There is no question as to whether this would be right or wrong. It would be impossible. One cannot ‘make’ characters, only marionettes. The manipulated movement of the marionette is not the ‘action’ necessary for plot. Characterless action is not action at all, in the plot sense. It is the indivisibility of the act from the actor, and the inevitability of that act on the part of that actor, that gives action verisimilitude. Without that, action is without force or reason. Forceless, reasonless action disrupts plot. The term ‘creation of character’ (or characters) is misleading. Characters pre-exist. They are found. They reveal themselves slowly to the novelist’s perception—as might fellow-travellers seated opposite one in a very dimly-lit railway carriage.

The novelist’s perceptions of his characters take place in the course of the actual writing of the novel. To an extent, the novelist is in the same position as his reader. But his perceptions should be always just in advance.

The ideal way of presenting character is to invite perception.

In what do the characters pre-exist? I should say, in the mass of matter (see       plot ) that had accumulated before the inception of the novel.

( N.B. —The unanswerability of the question, from an outsider: ‘Are the characters in your novel invented, or are they from real life?’ Obviously, neither is true. The outsider’s notion of ‘real life’ and the novelist’s are hopelessly apart.)

How, then, is the pre-existing character—with its own inner spring of action, its contrarieties—to be made to play a preassigned role? In relation to character, or characters, once these have been contemplated, plot must at once seem over-rigid, arbitrary.

What about the statement (in relation to PLOT) that ‘each character is created in order, and only in order, that he or she may supply the required action?’ To begin with, strike out ‘created.’ Better, the character is recognized (by the novelist) by the signs he or she gives of unique capacity to act in a certain way, which ‘certain way’ fulfils a need of the plot.

The character is there (in the novel) for the sake of the action he or she is to contribute to the plot. Yes. But also, he or she exists outside the action being contributed to the plot.

Without that existence of the character outside the (necessarily limited) action, the action itself would be invalid.

Action is the simplification (for story purposes) of complexity. For each one act, there are an x number of rejected alternatives. It is the palpable presence of the alternatives that gives action interest. Therefore, in each of the characters, while he or she is acting, the play and pull of alternatives must be felt. It is in being seen to be capable of alternatives that the character becomes, for the reader, valid.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

(Most exceptions to this are, however, masterpiece-novels. In War and Peace, L’Education Sentimentale and À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, unpredictability dominates up to the end.)

The character’s prominence in the novel (pre-decided by the plot) decides the character’s range—of alternatives. The novelist must allot (to the point of rationing) psychological space. The ‘hero,’ ‘heroine’ and ‘villain’ (if any) are, by agreement, allowed most range. They are entitled, for the portrayal of their alternatives, to time and space. Placing the characters in receding order to their importance to the plot, the number of their alternatives may seem to diminish. What E. M. Forster has called the ‘flat’ character has no alternatives at all.

The ideal novel is without ‘flat’ characters.

Characters must materialize—i.e., must have a palpable physical reality. They must be not only see-able (visualizable); they must be to be felt. Power to give physical reality is probably a matter of the extent and nature of the novelist’s physical sensibility, or susceptibility. In the main, English novelists are weak in this, as compared to French and Russians. Why?

Hopelessness of categoric ‘description.’ Why? Because this is static. Physical personality belongs to action: cannot be separated from it. Pictures must be in movement. Eyes, hands, stature, etc., must appear, and only appear, in play. Reaction to physical personality is part of action—love, or sexual passages, only more marked application of this general rule.

(Conrad an example of strong, non-sexual use of physical personality.)

The materialization (in the above sense) of the character for the novelist must be instantaneous. It happens. No effort of will—and obviously no effort of intellect—can induce it. The novelist can use a character that has not yet materialized. But the unmaterialized character represents an enemy pocket in an area that has been otherwise cleared. This cannot go on for long. It produces a halt in plot.

When the materialization has happened, the chapters written before it happened will almost certainly have to be recast. From the plot point of view, they will be found invalid.

Also, it is essential that for the reader the materialization of the character should begin early. I say begin, because for the reader it may, without harm, be gradual.

Is it from this failure, or tendency to fail, in materialization that the English novelist depends so much on engaging emotional sympathy for his characters?

Ruling sympathy out, a novel must contain at least one magnetic character. At least one character capable of keying the reader up, as though he (the reader) were in the presence of someone he is in love with. This is not a rule of salesmanship but a pre-essential of interest. The character must do to the reader what he has done to the novelist—magnetize towards himself perceptions, sense-impressions, desires.

The unfortunate case is, where the character has, obviously, acted magnetically upon the author, but fails to do so upon the reader.

There must be combustion. Plot depends for its movement on internal combustion.

Physically, characters are almost always copies, or composite copies. Traits, gestures, etc., are searched for in, and assembled from, the novelist’s memory. Or, a picture, a photograph, or the cinema screen may be drawn on. Nothing physical can be invented. (Invented physique stigmatizes the inferior novel.) Proust (in last volume) speaks of this assemblage of traits. Though much may be lifted from a specific person in ‘real life,’ no person in ‘real life’ could supply everything (physical) necessary for the character in the novel. No such person could have just that exact degree of physical intensity required for the character.

Greatness of characters is the measure of the unconscious greatness of the novelist’s vision. They are ‘true’ in so far as he is occupied with poetic truth. Their degrees in realness show the degrees of his concentration.

—Is a derivative of Plot. Gives actuality to Plot.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Plot having pre-decided what is to happen, scene, scenes, must be found, so chosen, as to give the happening the desired force.

Scene, being physical, is, like the physical traits of the characters, generally a copy, or a composite copy. It, too, is assembled—out of memories which, in the first place, may have had no rational connection with one another. Again, pictures, photographs, the screen are sources of supply. Also, dreams.

Almost anything drawn from ‘real life’—house, town, room, park, landscape—will almost certainly be found to require some distortion for the purposes of the plot. Remote memories, already distorted by the imagination, are most useful for the purposes of scene. Unfamiliar or once-seen places yield more than do familiar, often-seen places.

Wholly invented scene is as unsatisfactory (thin) as wholly invented physique for a character.

Scene, much more than character, is inside the novelist’s conscious power. More than any other constituent of the novel, it makes him conscious of his power.

This can be dangerous. The weak novelist is always, compensatorily, scene-minded. (Jane Austen’s economy of scene-painting, and her abstentions from it in what might be expected contexts, could in itself be proof of her mastery of the novel.)

Scene is only justified in the novel where it can be shown, or at least felt, to act upon action or character. In fact, where it has dramatic use.

Where not intended for dramatic use, scene is a sheer slower-down. Its staticness is a dead weight. It cannot make part of the plot’s movement by being show in play. (Thunderstorms, the sea, landscape flying past car or railway-carriage windows are not scene but happenings.)

The deadeningness of straight and prolonged ‘description’ is as apparent with regard to scene as it is with regard to character. Scene must be evoked. For its details relevance (See       relevance ) is essential. Scene must, like the characters, not fail to materialize. In this it follows the same law—instantaneous for the novelist, gradual for the reader.

In ‘setting a scene’ the novelist directs, or attempts to direct, the reader’s visual imagination. He must allow for the fact that the reader’s memories will not correspond with his own. Or, at least, not at all far along the way.

— Must (1) Further Plot. (2) Express Character.

Should not on any account be a vehicle for ideas for their own sake. Ideas only permissible where they provide a key to the character who expresses them.

Dialogue requires more art than does any other constituent of the novel. Art in the celare artem sense. Art in the trickery, self-justifying distortion sense. Why? Because dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism—the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer’s take-down of a ‘real life’ conversation—would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In ‘real life’ everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

What are the realistic qualities to be imitated (or faked) in novel dialogue?—Spontaneity. Artless or hit-or-miss arrival at words used. Ambiguity (speaker not sure, himself, what he means). Effect of choking (as in engine): more to be said than can come through. Irrelevance. Allusiveness. Erraticness: unpredictable course. Repercussion.

What must novel dialogue, behind mask of these faked realistic qualities, really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot.

During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique. Since the last confrontation, something has changed, advanced. What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will in turn, leave its effect.

Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, so be effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.

Short of a small range of physical acts—a fight, murder, love-making—dialogue is the most vigorous and visible interaction of which characters in a novel are capable. Speech is what the characters do to each other.

Dialogue provides means for the psychological materialization of the characters. It should short-circuit description of mental traits. Every sentence in dialogue should be descriptive of the character who is speaking. Idiom, tempo, and shape of each spoken sentence should be calculated by novelist, towards this descriptive end.

Dialogue is the first case of the novelist’s need for notation from real life. Remarks or turns of phrase indicatory of class, age, degree of intellectual pretension, idées reçues, nature and strength of governing fantasy, sexual temperament, persecution-sense or acumen (fortuitous arrival at general or poetic truth) should be collected. ( N.B. —Proust, example of this semi-conscious notation and putting to use of it.)

All the above, from class to acumen, may already have been established, with regard to each character, by a direct statement by the novelist to the reader. It is still, however, the business of dialogue to show these factors, or qualities, in play.

There must be present in dialogue— i.e., in each sentence spoken by each character— either (a) calculation, or (b) involuntary self-revelation.

Every piece of dialogue must be ‘something happening.’ Dialogue may justify its presence by being ‘illustrative’—but the secondary use of it must be watched closely, challenged. Illustrativeness can be stretched too far. Like straight description, it then becomes static, a dead weight—halting the movement of the plot. The ‘amusing’ for its own sake, should above all be censored. So should infatuation with any idiom.

The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the novelist’s mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.

What is this functional use? That of a bridge.

Dialogue is the thin bridge which must, from time to time, carry the entire weight of the novel. Two things to be kept in mind—(a) the bridge is there to permit advance, (b) the bridge must be strong enough for the weight.

Failure in any one piece of dialogue is a loss, at once to the continuity and the comprehensibility of the novel.

Characters should, on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.

The question of angle comes up twice over in the novel. Angle has two senses—(a) visual, (b) moral.

(a) Visual Angle. —This has been much discussed—particularly I think by Henry James. Where is the camera-eye to be located? (1) In the breast or brow of one of the characters? This is, of course, simplifying and integrating. But it imposes on the novel the limitations of the ‘I’—whether the first person is explicitly used or not. Also, with regard to any matter that the specific character does not (cannot) know, it involves the novelist in long cumbrous passages of cogitation, speculation and guesses. E.g. —of any character other than the specific (or virtual) ‘I’ it must always be ‘he appeared to feel,’ ‘he could be seen to see,’ rather than ‘he felt,’ ‘he saw.’ (2) In the breast or brow of a succession of characters? This is better. It must, if used, involve very careful, considered division of the characters, by the novelist, in the seeing and the seen. Certain characters gain in importance and magnetism by being only seen: this makes them more romantic, fatal-seeming, sinister. In fact, no character in which these qualities are, for the plot, essential should be allowed to enter the seeing class. (3) In the breast or brow of omniscient story-teller (the novelist)? This, though appearing naïve, would appear best. The novelist should retain right of entry, at will, into any of the characters: their memories, sensations and thought-processes should remain his, to requisition for appropriate use. What conditions ‘appropriateness’? The demands of the plot. Even so, the novelist must not lost sight of point made above—the gain in necessary effect, for some characters, of their remaining seen —their remaining closed, apparently, even to the omniscience of the novelist.

The cinema, with its actual camera-work, is interesting study for the novelist. In a good film, the camera’s movement, angle and distance have all worked towards one thing—the fullest possible realization of the director’s idea, the completest possible surrounding of the subject. Any trick is justified if it adds a statement. With both film and novel, plot is the pre-imperative. The novelist’s relation to the novel is that of the director’s relation to the film. The cinema, cinema-going has no doubt built up in novelists a great authoritarianism. This seems to me good.

(b) Moral Angle. —This too often means, pre-assumptions—social, political, sexual, national, aesthetic, and so on. These may all exist, sunk at different depths, in the same novelist. Their existence cannot fail to be palpable; and their nature determines, more than anything else, the sympatheticness or antipatheticness of a given novel to a given circle of readers.

Pre-assumptions are bad. They limit the novel to a given circle of readers. They cause the novel to act immorally on that given circle. (The lady asking the librarian for a ‘nice’ novel to take home is, virtually, asking for a novel whose pre-assumptions will be identical with her own.) Outside the given circle, a novel’s pre-assumptions must invalidate it for all other readers. The increasingly bad smell of most pre-assumptions probably accounts for the growing prestige of the detective story: the detective story works on the single, and universally acceptable, pre-assumption that an act of violence is anti-social, and that the doer, in the name of injured society, must be traced.

Great novelists write without pre-assumption. They write from outside their own nationality, class or sex.

To write thus should be the ambition of any novelist who wishes to state poetic truth.

Does this mean he must have no angle, no moral view-point? No, surely. Without these, he would be (a) incapable of maintaining the conviction necessary for the novel; (b) incapable of lighting the characters, who to be seen at all must necessarily be seen in a moral light.

From what source, then, must the conviction come? and from what morality is to come the light to be cast on the characters?

The conviction must come from certainty of the validity of the truth the novel is to present. The ‘moral light’ has not, actually, a moral source; it is moral (morally powerful) according to the strength of its power of revelation. Revelation of what? The virtuousness or non-virtuousness of the action of the character. What is virtue in action? Truth in action. Truth by what ruling, in relation to what? Truth by the ruling of, and in relation to, the inherent poetic truth that the novel states.

The presence, and action, of the poetic truth is the motive (or motor) morality of the novel.

The direction of the action of the poetic truth provides—in fact, is —the moral angle of the novel. If he remains with that truth in view, the novelist has no option as to his angle.

The action, or continuous line of action, of a character is ‘bad’ in so far as it runs counter to, resists, or attempts to deny, the action of the poetic truth. It is predisposition towards such action that constitutes ‘badness’ in a character.

‘Good’ action, or ‘goodness’ in the character, from pre-disposition towards such action, is movement along with, expressive of and contributory to, the action of the poetic truth.

If the novelist’s moral angle is (a) decided by recognition of the poetic truth, and (b) maintained by the necessity of stating the truth by showing the truth’s action, it will be, as it should be, impersonal. It will be, and (from the ‘interest’ point of view) will be able to stand being, pure of pre-assumptions—national, social, sexual, etc.

( N.B. —‘Humour’ is the weak point in the front against pre-assumptions. Almost all English humour shows social (sometimes, now, backed by political) pre-assumptions. (Extreme cases—that the lower, or employed, classes are quaint or funny—that aristocrats, served by butlers, are absurd. National pre-assumptions show in treatment of foreigners.)

It has been said that plot must advance; that the underlying (or inner) speed of the advance must be even. How is this arrived at?

(1) Obviously, first, by the succession, the succeedingness, of events or happenings. It is to be remembered that everything put on record at all—an image, a word spoken, an interior movement of thought or feeling on the part of a character—is an event or happening. These proceed out of one another, give birth to one another, in a continuity that must be (a) obvious, (b) unbroken.

(2) Every happening cannot be described, stated. The reader must be made to feel that what has not been described or stated has, none the less, happened. How? By the showing of subsequent events or happenings whose source could only have been in what has not actually been stated. Tuesday is Tuesday by virtue of being the day following Monday. The stated Tuesday must be shown as a derivative of the unstated Monday.

(3) For the sake of emphasis, time must be falsified. But the novelist’s consciousness of the subjective, arbitrary and emotional nature of the falsification should be evident to the reader. Against this falsification—in fact, increasing the force of its effect by contrast—a clock should be heard always impassively ticking away at the same speed. The passage of time, and its demarcation, should be a factor in plot. The either concentration or even or uneven spacing-out of events along time is important.

The statement ‘Ten years has passed,’ or the statement ‘It was now the next day’—each of these is an event.

(4) Characters most of all promote, by showing, the advance of the plot. How? By the advances, from act to act, in their action. By their showing (by emotional or physical changes) the effects both of action and of the passage of time. The diminution of the character’s alternatives shows (because it is the work of) advance—by the end of a novel the character’s alternatives, many at the beginning, have been reduced to almost none. In the novel, everything that happens happens either to or because of one of the characters. By the end of the novel, the character has, like the silk worm at work on the cocoon, spun itself out. Completed action is marked by the exhaustion (from one point of view) of the character. Throughout the novel, each character is expending potentiality. This expense of potentiality must be felt.

(5) Scene promotes, or contributes to, advance by its freshness. Generically, it is fresh, striking, from being unlike the scene before. It is the new ‘here and now.’ Once a scene ceases to offer freshness, it is a point-blank enemy to advance. Frequent change of scene not being an imperative of the novel—in fact, many novels by choice, and by wise choice, limiting themselves severely in this matter—how is there to continue to be freshness? By means of ever-differing presentation. Differing because of what? Season of year, time of day, effects of a happening ( e.g., with house, rise or fall in family fortunes, an arrival, a departure, a death), beholding character’s mood. At the first presentation, the scene has freshness; afterwards, the freshness must be in the presentation. The same scene can, by means of a series of presentations, each having freshness, be made to ripen, mature, to actually advance. The static properties in scene can be good for advance when so stressed as to show advance by contrast—advance on the part of the characters. Striking ‘unchangingness’ gives useful emphasis to change. Change should not be a factor, at once, in both scene and character; either unchanged character should see, or be seen against, changed scene, or changed character should see, or be seen, against unchanged scene. Two changes obviously cancel each other out, and would cancel each other’s contribution to the advance of plot.

Relevance —the question of it—is the headache of novel-writing.

As has been said, the model for relevance is the well-constructed detective story: nothing is ‘in’ that does not tell. But the detective story is, or would appear to be, simplified by having fact as its kernel. The detective story makes towards concrete truth; the novel makes towards abstract truth.

With the detective story, the question ‘relevant to what ?’ can be answered by the intelligence. With the novel, the same question must constantly, and in every context, be referred to the intuition. The intelligence, in a subsequent check over, may detect, but cannot itself put right, blunders, lapses or false starts on the part of the intuition.

In the notes on Plot, Character, Scene and Dialogue, everything has come to turn, by the end, on relevance. It is seen that all other relevances are subsidiary to the relevance of the plot— i.e., the relevance to itself that the plot demands. It is as contributory, in fact relevant, to plot that character, scene and dialogue are examined. To be perfectly contributory, these three must be perfectly relevant. If character, scene or dialogue has been weakened by anything irrelevant to itself, it can only be imperfectly relevant—which must mean, to a degree disruptive—to the plot.

The main hope for character (for each character) is that it should be magnetic— i.e., that it should attract its parts. This living propensity of the character to assemble itself, to integrate itself, to make itself in order to be itself will not, obviously, be resisted by the novelist. The magnetic, or magnetizing, character can be trusted as to what is relevant to itself. The trouble comes when what is relevant to the character is found to be not relevant to the plot. At this point, the novelist must adjudicate. It is possible that the character may be right; it is possible that there may be some flaw in the novelist’s sense of what is relevant to the plot.

Again, the character may, in fact must, decide one half of the question of relevance in dialogue. The character attracts to itself the right, in fact the only possible, idiom, tempo and phraseology for that particular character in speech. In so far as dialogue is illustrative, the character’s, or characters’, pull on it must not be resisted.

But in so far as dialogue must be ‘something happening’—part of action, a means of advancing plot—the other half of the question of dialogue-relevance comes up. Here, the pull from the characters may conflict with the pull from the plot. Here again the novelist must adjudicate. The recasting and recasting of dialogue that is so often necessary is, probably, the search for ideal compromise.

Relevance in scene is more straightforward. Chiefly, the novelist must control his infatuation with his own visual power. No non-contributory image, must be the rule. Contributory to what? To the mood of the ‘now,’ the mood that either projects or reflects action. It is a good main rule that objects—chairs, trees, glasses, mountains, cushions—introduced into the novel should be stage-properties, necessary for ‘business.’ It will be also recalled that the well-set stage shows many objects not actually necessary for ‘business,’ but that these have a right to place by being descriptive—explanatory. In a play, the absence of the narrating voice makes it necessary to establish the class, period and general psychology of the characters by means of objects that can be seen. In the novel, such putting of objects to a descriptive (explanatory) use is excellent—alternative to the narrator’s voice.

In scene then, relevance demands either usefulness for action or else explanatory power in what is shown. There is no doubt that with some writers (Balzac, sometimes Arnold Bennett) categoricalness, in the presentation of scene, is effective. The aim is, usually, to suggest, by multiplication and exactitude of detail, either a scene’s material oppressiveness or its intrinsic authority. But in general, for the purposes of most novelists, the number of objects genuinely necessary for explanation will be found to be very small.

Irrelevance, in any part, is a cloud and a drag on, a weakener of, the novel. It dilutes meaning. Relevance crystallizes meaning.

The novelist’s—any writer’s—object is, to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, is fatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.

Much irrelevance is introduced into novels by the writer’s vague hope that at least some of this may turn out to be relevant, after all. A good deal of what might be called provisional writing goes to the first drafts of first chapters of most novels. At a point in the novel’s progress, relevance becomes clearer. The provisional chapters are then recast.

The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance—due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author’s attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful—and possibly the only—help that can be given.

Writing (Expository Essay)

Back to: ENGLISH LANGUAGE JSS3

Welcome to Class !!

We are eager to have you join us !!

In today’s English Language class, We will be learning about how to write an Expository Essay.  We hope you enjoy the class!

An expository essay is a type of essay in which students are expected to explain a thing or a process in full. In expository essays, facts about situations, descriptions of things are stated as well as judgments.

In an expository essay, definitions of terms can be given, comparison of things can be done, causes and effects of something can be discussed, illustrations can also be given, etc.

The dominant tense used in expository essays is simple present tense. Also, every expository essay must have a title.

Write a good essay on the topic “Why students fail examination”

Countdown English by Ogunsanwo

READING ASSIGNMENT

Read more on expository essays from Exam Focus: pages 18&19

We have come to the end of this class. We do hope you enjoyed the class?

Should you have any further question, feel free to ask in the comment section below and trust us to respond as soon as possible.

In our next class, we will be learning about Vowels \ ɑː \ and \ ɜː \.  We are very much eager to meet you there.

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NOTES ON ESSAY WRITING

Related Papers

IJAR Indexing

Dos Santos de Jesus, Emilia. 2017. ?An Analysis of Argumentative writing of the Fifth Semester Students of English Study Program of Universidade Dili in Academic Year 2016/2017?. Supevisors: (I) Prof. Feliks Tans, M.Ed., Ph.D, (II) Dr. Agustinus Semiun, MA. There are two problems to be answered in this writing, namely how the fifth semester students of English Study Program of Universidade Dili write argumentative texts and what their problems are in writing argumentative texts. This writing aims at analyzing students? argumentative writing and finding out their problems in writing argumentative texts. This study employs descriptive qualitative method. It describes deeply the findings related to the aims of study above. The data of this result is taken from the written forms of argumentative texts by the fifth semester students of English Study Program of Universidade Dili. The research shows that the students? argumentative writing is cohesively, coherently, and grammatically correct. However, some other mostly students present in cohesive, incoherent, and grammatically incorrect argumentative texts. Furthermore, there are several problems faced by the students in writing argumentative texts, namely: transferring ideas in writing, lack of vocabularies, problem in using grammar, difficulties to start writing, lack of reading sources, problems in organizing their writing, and inconsistently in developing idea.

Tùng McLeonard

Shazna Abu Bakar , Aysha Sharif

Aysha Sharif

Ian B Turner

This thesis integrates insights from linguistics and rhetoric/ composition studies to create and test the effectiveness of a writing guide, designed for independent use by composition students, that is aimed at improving the global text quality of argumentative essays by helping students consider the “rhetorical situation” (Bitzer 1968) as a communicative context that motivates the deployment of features of well-formed written discourse (Berman 2008). The guide attempts to make pedagogical use of Berman’s descriptive framework of facets of discourse—global level principles, categories of referential content […] and overall discourse stance” which stem from a large scale cross-linguistic research project on the development of discourse abilities (Berman 2008: 735). The student writing guide, created by building this discourse framework upon the groundwork of rhetoric and composition theory, was tested for its effectiveness to improve drafts of writing by using online data collection methods. A group of advanced-placed ELL students wrote first drafts of argumentative essays. After reading and understanding the writing guide, participants then used it to write second drafts by revising their first drafts. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed to ascertain the extent to which the second drafts showed improvement in global text quality. While most of the second drafts showed little change in their levels of global text quality, all of the revised drafts indicated an increase in the usage of discourse features involved in global text quality and rhetorical effectiveness. Despite minor difficulties participants had with some the content of the guide, participants overall understood and were able to use the writing guide to revise their drafts and imagine a communicative context (rhetorical situation) for their written discourse.

Marcos Bertorello

Mediterranean Journal of Humanities

Nuray Gedik

Dijana Drandić

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America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed

Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses. Students took them at their word.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

N ick Wilson, a sophomore at Cornell University, came to Ithaca, New York, to refine his skills as an activist. Attracted by both Cornell’s labor-relations school and the university’s history of campus radicalism, he wrote his application essay about his involvement with a Democratic Socialists of America campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act . When he arrived on campus, he witnessed any number of signs that Cornell shared his commitment to not just activism but also militant protest, taking note of a plaque commemorating the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall in 1969.

Cornell positively romanticizes that event: The university library has published a “ Willard Straight Hall Occupation Study Guide ,” and the office of the dean of students once co-sponsored a panel on the protest. The school has repeatedly screened a documentary about the occupation, Agents of Change . The school’s official newspaper, published by the university media-relations office, ran a series of articles honoring the 40th anniversary, in 2009, and in 2019, Cornell held a yearlong celebration for the 50th, complete with a commemorative walk, a dedication ceremony, and a public conversation with some of the occupiers. “ Occupation Anniversary Inspires Continued Progress ,” the Cornell Chronicle headline read.

As Wilson has discovered firsthand, however, the school’s hagiographical odes to prior protests have not prevented it from cracking down on pro-Palestine protests in the present. Now that he has been suspended for the very thing he told Cornell he came there to learn how to do—radical political organizing—he is left reflecting on the school’s hypocrisies. That the theme of this school year at Cornell is “Freedom of Expression” adds a layer of grim humor to the affair.

Evan Mandery: University of hypocrisy

University leaders are in a bind. “These protests are really dynamic situations that can change from minute to minute,” Stephen Solomon, who teaches First Amendment law and is the director of NYU’s First Amendment Watch—an organization devoted to free speech—told me. “But the obligation of universities is to make the distinction between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that is not.” Some of the speech and tactics protesters are employing may not be protected under the First Amendment, while much of it plainly is. The challenge universities are confronting is not just the law but also their own rhetoric. Many universities at the center of the ongoing police crackdowns have long sought to portray themselves as bastions of activism and free thought. Cornell is one of many universities that champion their legacy of student activism when convenient, only to bring the hammer down on present-day activists when it’s not. The same colleges that appeal to students such as Wilson by promoting opportunities for engagement and activism are now suspending them. And they’re calling the cops.

The police activity we are seeing universities level against their own students does not just scuff the carefully cultivated progressive reputations of elite private universities such as Columbia, Emory University, and NYU, or the equally manicured free-speech bona fides of red-state public schools such as Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin. It also exposes what these universities have become in the 21st century. Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged. Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them. And rather than try to understand their role in cultivating this morass, the Ivory Tower’s bigwigs have decided to apply their boot heels to the throats of those under their care.

I spoke with 30 students, professors, and administrators from eight schools—a mix of public and private institutions across the United States—to get a sense of the disconnect between these institutions’ marketing of activism and their treatment of protesters. A number of people asked to remain anonymous. Some were untenured faculty or administrators concerned about repercussions from, or for, their institutions. Others were directly involved in organizing protests and were wary of being harassed. Several incoming students I spoke with were worried about being punished by their school before they even arrived. Despite a variety of ideological commitments and often conflicting views on the protests, many of those I interviewed were “shocked but not surprised”—a phrase that came up time and again—by the hypocrisy exhibited by the universities with which they were affiliated. (I reached out to Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Emory for comment on the disconnect between their championing of past protests and their crackdowns on the current protesters. Representatives from Columbia, Cornell, and Emory pointed me to previous public statements. NYU did not respond.)

The sense that Columbia trades on the legacy of the Vietnam protests that rocked campus in 1968 was widespread among the students I spoke with. Indeed, the university honors its activist past both directly and indirectly, through library archives , an online exhibit , an official “Columbia 1968” X account , no shortage of anniversary articles in Columbia Magazine , and a current course titled simply “Columbia 1968.” The university is sometimes referred to by alumni and aspirants as the “Protest Ivy.” One incoming student told me that he applied to the school in part because of an admissions page that prominently listed community organizers and activists among its “distinguished alumni.”

Joseph Slaughter, an English professor and the executive director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, talked with his class about the 1968 protests after the recent arrests at the school. He said his students felt that the university had actively marketed its history to them. “Many, many, many of them said they were sold the story of 1968 as part of coming to Columbia,” he told me. “They talked about it as what the university presents to them as the long history and tradition of student activism. They described it as part of the brand.”

This message reaches students before they take their first college class. As pro-Palestine demonstrations began to raise tensions on campus last month, administrators were keen to cast these protests as part of Columbia’s proud culture of student activism. The aforementioned high-school senior who had been impressed by Columbia’s activist alumni attended the university’s admitted-students weekend just days before the April 18 NYPD roundup. During the event, the student said, an admissions official warned attendees that they may experience “disruptions” during their visit, but boasted that these were simply part of the school’s “long and robust history of student protest.”

Remarkably, after more than 100 students were arrested on the order of Columbia President Minouche Shafik—in which she overruled a unanimous vote by the university senate’s executive committee not to bring the NYPD to campus —university administrators were still pushing this message to new students and parents. An email sent on April 19 informed incoming students that “demonstration, political activism, and deep respect for freedom of expression have long been part of the fabric of our campus.” Another email sent on April 20 again promoted Columbia’s tradition of activism, protest, and support of free speech. “This can sometimes create moments of tension,” the email read, “but the rich dialogue and debate that accompany this tradition is central to our educational experience.”

Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier: The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy

Another student who attended a different event for admitted students, this one on April 21, said that every administrator she heard speak paid lip service to the school’s long history of protest. Her own feelings about the pro-Palestine protests were mixed—she said she believes that a genocide is happening in Gaza and also that some elements of the protest are plainly anti-Semitic—but her feelings about Columbia’s decision to involve the police were unambiguous. “It’s reprehensible but exactly what an Ivy League institution would do in this situation. I don’t know why everyone is shocked,” she said, adding: “It makes me terrified to go there.”

Beth Massey, a veteran activist who participated in the 1968 protests, told me with a laugh, “They might want to tell us they’re progressive, but they’re doing the business of the ruling class.” She was not surprised by the harsh response to the current student encampment or by the fact that it lit the fuse on a nationwide protest movement. Massey had been drawn to the radical reputation of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, as an open-minded teenager from the segregated South: “I actually wanted to go to Barnard because they had a history of progressive struggle that had happened going all the way back into the ’40s.” And the barn-burning history that appealed to Massey in the late 1960s has continued to attract contemporary students, albeit with one key difference: Today, that radical history has become part of the way that Barnard and Columbia sell their $60,000-plus annual tuition.

Of course, Columbia is not alone. The same trends have also prevailed at NYU, which likes to crow about its own radical history and promises contemporary students “ a world of activism opportunities .” An article published on the university’s website in March—titled “Make a Difference Through Activism at NYU”—promises students “myriad chances to put your activism into action.” The article points to campus institutions that “provide students with resources and opportunities to spark activism and change both on campus and beyond.” The six years I spent as a graduate student at NYU gave me plenty of reasons to be cynical about the university and taught me to view all of this empty activism prattle as white noise. But even I was astounded to see a video of students and faculty set upon by the NYPD, arrested at the behest of President Linda Mills.

“Across the board, there is a heightened awareness of hypocrisy,” Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at NYU, told me, noting that faculty were acutely conscious of the gap between the institution’s intensive commitment to DEI and the police crackdown. The university has recently made several “cluster hires”—centered on activism-oriented themes such as anti-racism, social justice, and indigeneity—that helped diversify the faculty. Some of those recent hires were among the people who spent a night zip-tied in a jail cell, arrested for the exact kind of activism that had made them attractive to NYU in the first place. And it wasn’t just faculty. The law students I spoke with were especially acerbic. After honing her activism skills at her undergraduate institution—another university that recently saw a violent police response to pro-Palestine protests—one law student said she came to NYU because she was drawn to its progressive reputation and its high percentage of prison-abolitionist faculty. This irony was not lost on her as the police descended on the encampment.

After Columbia students were arrested on April 18, students at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study decided to cancel a planned art festival and instead use the time to make sandwiches as jail support for their detained uptown peers. The school took photos of the students layering cold cuts on bread and posted it to Gallatin’s official Instagram. These posts not only failed to mention that the students were working in support of the pro-Palestine protesters; the caption—“making sandwiches for those in need”—implied that the undergrads might be preparing meals for, say, the homeless.

The contradictions on display at Cornell, Columbia, and NYU are not limited to the state of New York. The police response at Emory, another university that brags about its tradition of student protest, was among the most disturbing I have seen. Faculty members I spoke with at the Atlanta school, including two who had been arrested—the philosophy professor Noëlle McAfee and the English and Indigenous-studies professor Emil’ Keme—recounted harrowing scenes: a student being knocked down, an elderly woman struggling to breathe after tear-gas exposure, a colleague with welts from rubber bullets. These images sharply contrast with the university’s progressive mythmaking, a process that was in place even before 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning” sent universities scrambling to shore up their activist credentials.

In 2018, Emory’s Campus Life office partnered with students and a design studio to begin work on an exhibit celebrating the university’s history of identity-based activism. Then, not long after George Floyd’s murder, the university’s library released a series of blog posts focusing on topics including “Black Student Activism at Emory,” “Protests and Movements,” “Voting Rights and Public Policy,” and “Authors and Artists as Activists.” That same year, the university announced its new Arts and Social Justice Fellows initiative, a program that “brings Atlanta artists into Emory classrooms to help students translate their learning into creative activism in the name of social justice.” In 2021, the university put on an exhibit celebrating its 1969 protests , in which “Black students marched, demonstrated, picketed, and ‘rapped’ on those institutions affecting the lives of workers and students at Emory.” Like Cornell’s and Columbia’s, Emory’s protests seem to age like fine wine: It takes half a century before the institution begins enjoying them.

N early every person I talked with believed that their universities’ responses were driven by donors, alumni, politicians, or some combination thereof. They did not believe that they were grounded in serious or reasonable concerns about the physical safety of students; in fact, most felt strongly that introducing police into the equation had made things far more dangerous for both pro-Palestine protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters. Jeremi Suri, a historian at UT Austin—who told me he is not politically aligned with the protesters—recalls pleading with both the dean of students and the mounted state troopers to call off the charge. “It was like the Russian army had come onto campus,” Suri mused. “I was out there for 45 minutes to an hour. I’m very sensitive to anti-Semitism. Nothing anti-Semitic was said.” He added: “There was no reason not to let them shout until their voices went out.”

From the May 1930 issue: Hypocrisy–a defense

As one experienced senior administrator at a major research university told me, the conflagration we are witnessing shows how little many university presidents understand either their campus communities or the young people who populate them. “When I saw what Columbia was doing, my immediate thought was: They have not thought about day two ,” he said, laughing. “If you confront an 18-year-old activist, they don’t back down. They double down.” That’s what happened in 1968, and it’s happening again now. Early Tuesday morning, Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall—the site of the 1968 occupation, which they rechristened Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza—in response to the university’s draconian handling of the protests. They explicitly tied these events to the university’s past, calling out its hypocrisy on Instagram: “This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968 … which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today.” The university, for its part, responded now as it did then: Late on Tuesday, the NYPD swarmed the campus in an overnight raid that led to the arrest of dozens of students.

The students, professors, and administrators I’ve spoken with in recent days have made clear that this hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed and that the crackdown isn’t working, but making things worse. The campus resistance has expanded to include faculty and students who were originally more ambivalent about the protests and, in a number of cases, who support Israel. They are disturbed by what they rightly see as violations of free expression, the erosion of faculty governance, and the overreach of administrators. Above all, they’re fed up with the incandescent hypocrisy of institutions, hoisted with their own progressive petards, as the unstoppable force of years’ worth of self-righteous rhetoric and pseudo-radical posturing meets the immovable object of students who took them at their word.

In another video published by The Cornell Daily Sun , recorded only hours after he was suspended, Nick Wilson explained to a crowd of student protesters what had brought him to the school. “In high school, I discovered my passion, which was community organizing for a better world. I told Cornell University that’s why I wanted to be here,” he said, referencing his college essay. Then he paused for emphasis, looking around as his peers began to cheer. “And those fuckers admitted me.”

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Navel Gazing

John dickerson’s notebooks: remembering early 1990s new york.

Getting used to a new city, work advice, passing on wisdom, and more are explored in this week’s audio essay from John Dickerson.

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Episode Notes

In this week’s essay, John discusses an onboarding memo for his assistant Laura, and recounts his early days living and working in New York City.

Notebook Entries:

Notebook 75

Onboard memo for Laura

Notebook 3, page 44. May 1991

June 17 start job. Good stuff

Notebook 3, page 46. May 1991

Tips on buying renting in NYC

Ask about broker

20s and 30s East side. Murry Hill

Live on no major avenue

Interest bearing account for security deposit

Medeco locks

Notebook 4, page 15

Scared standing on 34th and Broadway

$6 cab fare

Notebook 4, page 42

Getting lost in the village

References:

The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes by Clifton Fadiman

Medeco Locks

“ Here is New York ” by E.B. White

“ Silly Job Interview ” - Monty Python

John Cleese on Creativity in Management

Herbie Hancock: Miles Davis’ Essential Lesson On Mistakes

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Podcast production by Cheyna Roth.

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About the Show

Political Gabfest host John Dickerson has been a journalist for more than three decades, reporting about presidential campaigns, political scandals, and the evolving state of our democracy. Along the way, he’s also been recording his observations in notebooks he has carried in his back pocket. He has captured his thoughts about life, parenthood, death, friendship, writing, God, to-do lists, and more. On the Navel Gazing podcast, John Dickerson invites you to join him in figuring out what these 30 years of notebooks mean: sorting out what makes a life—or a day in a life—noteworthy.

John Dickerson is host of CBS News Prime Time With John Dickerson , co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest, host of the Whistlestop podcast, and author of The Hardest Job in the World .

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When Donald J. Trump met Stormy Daniels, their flirtation seemed fleeting: He was a 60-year-old married mogul at the peak of reality television fame, and she was 27, a Louisiana native raised in poverty and headed to porn-film stardom.

But that chance encounter in Lake Tahoe, Nev., some two decades ago is now at the center of the first criminal trial of an American president, an unprecedented case that could shape the 2024 presidential race.

This week, Ms. Daniels has been on the witness stand telling her side of the story, often in explicit detail. She has already faced five hours of questioning, and after the trial’s midweek hiatus, she is expected to return on Thursday to undergo additional cross-examination from Mr. Trump’s legal team.

The charges against Mr. Trump stem from her story of sex with him during that 2006 celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, a story she was shopping a decade later, in the closing days of the presidential campaign. Mr. Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, paid Ms. Daniels $130,000 in hush money before Election Day, and the former president is accused of falsifying business records to cover up reimbursements for Mr. Cohen.

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On Tuesday, Ms. Daniels’s fast-paced testimony lasted nearly five hours, during which she described an encounter with Mr. Trump, now 77, that he has long denied. Tension gripped the courtroom, her voluble testimony filling a heavy silence. She made jokes; they did not land.

After about a half-hour on the stand, she began to unspool intimate details about Mr. Trump, so much so that the judge balked at some of the testimony. He implied it was gratuitously vulgar, and the defense sought a mistrial.

Ms. Daniels said the future president had invited her to dinner inside his palatial Lake Tahoe hotel suite. He answered the door wearing silk pajamas. When he was rude, she playfully spanked him with a rolled-up magazine. And when she asked about his wife, he told her not to worry, saying that they didn’t even sleep in the same room — prompting Mr. Trump to shake his head in disgust and mutter “bullshit” to his lawyers, loud enough that it drew a private rebuke from the judge, who called it “contemptuous.”

Ms. Daniels then recounted the sex itself in graphic detail. It happened, she said, after she returned from the bathroom and found Mr. Trump in his boxer shorts and T-shirt. She tried to leave and he blocked her path, though not, she said, in a threatening manner. The sex was brief, she said, and although she never said no, there was a “power imbalance.”

“I was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how I got there,” she told the jury, adding that Mr. Trump did not wear a condom.

The testimony was an astonishing moment in American political history and a crowning spectacle in a trial full of them: a porn star, across from a former and potentially future president, telling the world what she was once paid to keep quiet about.

Ms. Daniels, 45, has told her story widely — to prosecutors, reporters, her friends, in a book — but never to jurors, and not with Mr. Trump in the room. Her appearance on the stand appeared to unnerve Mr. Trump as she aired his dirty laundry, under oath, in mortifying detail.

But Ms. Daniels’s story is not just a sordid kiss-and-tell tale; it spotlights what prosecutors say was Mr. Trump’s criminality. He is accused of engineering the false business records scheme to cover up all traces of their tryst: the hush money, the repayment to Mr. Cohen and, yes, the sex.

While the defense cast the testimony as a smear, Ms. Daniels provided prosecutors with some useful details. She established the fundamental story of her encounter with Mr. Trump. And she testified that she would have told the same uncomfortable tale in 2016, had she not taken the hush money from Mr. Trump’s fixer.

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The first criminal trial of former President Donald J. Trump is underway. Take a closer look at central figures related to the case.

But her testimony, at times, seemed problematic for the prosecutors who had called her. Ms. Daniels testified that money was not her motivation, and that she wanted to get her story out. That could draw skepticism from jurors, who have heard that she accepted the $130,000 and, in exchange, did not tell her story for more than a year.

“My motivation wasn’t money,” she said. “It was motivated out of fear, not money.”

The jury also saw the judge, Juan M. Merchan, scold Ms. Daniels at least twice, instructing her to stick to the questions asked of her. At one point, he even issued his own objection, interrupting her testimony as she began to describe the sexual position she and Mr. Trump assumed.

Justice Merchan, generally a stoic presence with a tight grip over his courtroom, showed rare exasperation as the testimony veered in a scurrilous direction and the trial took on a circuslike atmosphere.

He also asked Ms. Daniels to slow down. She was a rapid-fire talker, prone to laughter and lengthy asides.

Outside the jury’s presence, the judge said that “there were some things better left unsaid” in her testimony and suggested that Ms. Daniels might have “credibility issues.”

Yet he rejected the defense’s bid for a mistrial, instead inviting Mr. Trump’s lawyers to mount an aggressive questioning of Ms. Daniels.

“The more times this story has changed, the more fodder for cross-examination,” he said.

Susan Necheles, the Trump lawyer who led the cross-examination, heeded the judge’s advice.

She painted Ms. Daniels as a lying opportunist. She unearthed excerpts from Ms. Daniels’s book to suggest that her story had changed over time. And in a potentially troublesome moment for Ms. Daniels, Ms. Necheles implied that she had fabricated an account of a Trump supporter threatening her and her daughter in a Las Vegas parking lot, a story she did not share with her baby’s father.

“Your daughter’s life was in jeopardy, and you did not tell her father, right?” Ms. Necheles asked, the implication being that the story was phony.

Ms. Daniels was indignant. And during some cross-examination, she parried effectively, performing even better than she did with her answers to prosecutors.

Her testimony brought full circle one of the earliest scandals that loomed over Mr. Trump’s presidency. Ever since The Wall Street Journal broke the news six years ago that Mr. Cohen had paid her to keep quiet, her story has changed the course of American politics and laid the groundwork for the case.

Over the years, Ms. Daniels has leaned into her Trump-adjacent fame. She has sold merchandise, filmed a documentary, sat for high-profile interviews and written a book that was so tell-all it included detailed descriptions of the former president’s genitalia. Mr. Trump has also dished out insults that ridiculed her appearance, calling her “horseface.”

But at other times, Ms. Daniels appeared tortured, detailing the personal toll of outsize exposure. Suddenly, she was not just a porn star but a threat to a man who commands the most fervent political movement in modern American history. She told reporters she was inundated by threats from Trump supporters, many of which were graphic. She feared for her family and has divorced her third husband, the father of her daughter.

“I have been just tormented for the last five years or so,” she said in the opening scene of “Stormy,” a documentary about her life that was released on Peacock. “And here I am, I’m still here.”

Ms. Daniels joined the trial at a pivotal moment. On Monday, prosecutors had asked two veterans of the Trump Organization’s accounting department to show jurors the 34 records they say Mr. Trump falsified to conceal his reimbursement of Mr. Cohen for the hush money. Those include 11 invoices, 11 checks and 12 entries in Mr. Trump’s ledger that portrayed the payments as normal legal expenses.

The Donald Trump Indictment, Annotated

The indictment unveiled in April 2023 centers on a hush-money deal with a porn star, but a related document alleges a broader scheme to protect Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In the weeks ahead, Mr. Cohen is expected to take the stand and connect the dots between the salacious details and the substantive documents. On Tuesday, Ms. Daniels’s testimony took jurors through the smuttier elements of the case.

She began by recounting a difficult childhood in Baton Rouge. Her parents split up when she was young, she said.

She wanted to be a veterinarian and was editor of her high school newspaper. Eventually, she began stripping, she says, because she earned more than she did shoveling manure at a horse stable.

By the time she met Mr. Trump at the golf tournament in 2006, she was a player in porn. She was an actress, and would ultimately find her footing as a director and producer.

Asked to identify Mr. Trump in the courtroom, she called him out as the man in a navy suit jacket. Ms. Daniels, dressed in all black and wearing glasses, reduced the singular former president to just another man in the courtroom.

She spent much of her testimony describing that first encounter in Lake Tahoe. When she met Mr. Trump, she knew he was a golfer and the host of the “The Apprentice,” the reality show that revived Mr. Trump’s celebrity for a new generation. In a memorable line, Ms. Daniels said she also knew that he was “as old or older than my father.”

Later that day, she said, Mr. Trump’s aide approached and invited her to dinner. She says he took her number, but that her initial reaction was “eff no,” abbreviating an expletive.

But her publicist encouraged her: “What could possibly go wrong?”

She then transported jurors inside his hotel room, painting the sprawling suite in minute detail, capturing every aspect down to the color of the tiles.

She said Mr. Trump had taken an interest in her business and asked about unions, residuals and health insurance, as well as about testing for sexually transmitted diseases. “He was very interested in how I segued from becoming just a porn star to writing and directing,” she said.

Ms. Daniels said Mr. Trump told her, “You remind me of my daughter. She is smart and blond and beautiful, and people underestimate her as well.”

She recalled going into the bathroom to do her lipstick, where, she said, she noticed gold tweezers and Old Spice.

Later, they stayed in touch, she said. In 2007, they met at Trump Tower in New York, at a Trump Vodka launch party in Los Angeles and at a Beverly Hills hotel — all interactions that appeared to undercut Mr. Trump’s claims that he barely knew her.

The jury was also shown contact logs from Ms. Daniels’s phone and from Mr. Trump’s assistant’s phone showing that they remained in touch. And when they did talk, she said, Mr. Trump had a nickname for her: “honeybunch.”

They have only spoken through lawyers since then, most notably during the hush-money negotiations. When Ms. Necheles accused Ms. Daniels of using that effort to “extort money from President Trump,” Ms. Daniels objected.

“False,” she said.

“That’s what you did, right?” Ms. Necheles persisted.

“False!” Ms. Daniels shouted.

Reporting was contributed by William K. Rashbaum , Kate Christobek , Jesse McKinley , Wesley Parnell and Matthew Haag .

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies. More about Ben Protess

Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state criminal courts in Manhattan. More about Jonah E. Bromwich

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter in New York, writing in-depth stories focused on the city’s government, business and personalities. More about Michael Rothfeld

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Our Coverage of the Trump Hush-Money Trial

News and Analysis

Custodial witnesses, who are used to authenticate documents and events, have provided some of the more ordinary testimony in the trial, discussing FedEx labels, Sharpie usage and stapling protocol. Here’s how they’ve affirmed the basic facts  of it all.

Donald Trump, the onetime president, and Stormy Daniel s, the longtime porn star, despise one another. But when Daniels returned to the witness stand at Trump’s criminal trial, his lawyers made them sound a lot alike .

Justice Juan M. Merchan ended a long day of testimony by issuing a blistering ruling from the bench  denying a request for a mistrial, marking the second time in days that he rejected an attempt by one of Trump’s lawyers to seek a mistrial,

More on Trump’s Legal Troubles

Key Inquiries: Trump faces several investigations  at both the state and the federal levels, into matters related to his business and political careers.

Case Tracker:  Keep track of the developments in the criminal cases  involving the former president.

What if Trump Is Convicted?: Could he go to prison ? And will any of the proceedings hinder Trump’s presidential campaign? Here is what we know , and what we don’t know .

Trump on Trial Newsletter: Sign up here  to get the latest news and analysis  on the cases in New York, Florida, Georgia and Washington, D.C.

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• Published: 08 May 2024

Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3

• Josh Abramson   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0000-3496-6952 1   na1 ,
• Jonas Adler   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9928-3407 1   na1 ,
• Jack Dunger 1   na1 ,
• Richard Evans   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4675-8469 1   na1 ,
• Tim Green   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3227-1505 1   na1 ,
• Alexander Pritzel   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4233-9040 1   na1 ,
• Olaf Ronneberger   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4266-1515 1   na1 ,
• Lindsay Willmore   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4314-0778 1   na1 ,
• Andrew J. Ballard   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4956-5304 1 ,
• Joshua Bambrick   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0003-3908-0722 2 ,
• Sebastian W. Bodenstein 1 ,
• David A. Evans 1 ,
• Chia-Chun Hung   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5264-9165 2 ,
• Michael O’Neill 1 ,
• David Reiman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1605-7197 1 ,
• Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-8594-1074 1 ,
• Zachary Wu   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2429-9812 1 ,
• Akvilė Žemgulytė 1 ,
• Eirini Arvaniti 3 ,
• Charles Beattie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1840-054X 3 ,
• Ottavia Bertolli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8578-3216 3 ,
• Alex Bridgland 3 ,
• Alexey Cherepanov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5227-0622 4 ,
• Miles Congreve 4 ,
• Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers 3 ,
• Andrew Cowie   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4491-1434 3 ,
• Michael Figurnov   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1386-8741 3 ,
• Fabian B. Fuchs 3 ,
• Hannah Gladman 3 ,
• Rishub Jain 3 ,
• Yousuf A. Khan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0201-2796 3 ,
• Caroline M. R. Low 4 ,
• Kuba Perlin 3 ,
• Anna Potapenko 3 ,
• Pascal Savy 4 ,
• Sukhdeep Singh 3 ,
• Adrian Stecula   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6743 4 ,
• Ashok Thillaisundaram 3 ,
• Catherine Tong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7570-4801 4 ,
• Sergei Yakneen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7827-9839 4 ,
• Ellen D. Zhong   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6345-1907 3 ,
• Michal Zielinski 3 ,
• Augustin Žídek   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0748-9684 3 ,
• Victor Bapst 1   na2 ,
• Pushmeet Kohli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7466-7997 1   na2 ,
• Max Jaderberg   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9033-2695 2   na2 ,
• Demis Hassabis   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2812-9917 1 , 2   na2 &
• John M. Jumper   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6169-6580 1   na2  

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• Protein structure predictions
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The introduction of AlphaFold 2 1 has spurred a revolution in modelling the structure of proteins and their interactions, enabling a huge range of applications in protein modelling and design 2–6 . In this paper, we describe our AlphaFold 3 model with a substantially updated diffusion-based architecture, which is capable of joint structure prediction of complexes including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions, and modified residues. The new AlphaFold model demonstrates significantly improved accuracy over many previous specialised tools: far greater accuracy on protein-ligand interactions than state of the art docking tools, much higher accuracy on protein-nucleic acid interactions than nucleic-acid-specific predictors, and significantly higher antibody-antigen prediction accuracy than AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3 7,8 . Together these results show that high accuracy modelling across biomolecular space is possible within a single unified deep learning framework.

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These authors contributed equally: Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore

These authors jointly supervised this work: Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Max Jaderberg, Demis Hassabis, John M. Jumper

Authors and Affiliations

Core Contributor, Google DeepMind, London, UK

Josh Abramson, Jonas Adler, Jack Dunger, Richard Evans, Tim Green, Alexander Pritzel, Olaf Ronneberger, Lindsay Willmore, Andrew J. Ballard, Sebastian W. Bodenstein, David A. Evans, Michael O’Neill, David Reiman, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Zachary Wu, Akvilė Žemgulytė, Victor Bapst, Pushmeet Kohli, Demis Hassabis & John M. Jumper

Core Contributor, Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Joshua Bambrick, Chia-Chun Hung, Max Jaderberg & Demis Hassabis

Google DeepMind, London, UK

Eirini Arvaniti, Charles Beattie, Ottavia Bertolli, Alex Bridgland, Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers, Andrew Cowie, Michael Figurnov, Fabian B. Fuchs, Hannah Gladman, Rishub Jain, Yousuf A. Khan, Kuba Perlin, Anna Potapenko, Sukhdeep Singh, Ashok Thillaisundaram, Ellen D. Zhong, Michal Zielinski & Augustin Žídek

Isomorphic Labs, London, UK

Alexey Cherepanov, Miles Congreve, Caroline M. R. Low, Pascal Savy, Adrian Stecula, Catherine Tong & Sergei Yakneen

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Correspondence to Max Jaderberg , Demis Hassabis or John M. Jumper .

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Supplementary information.

This Supplementary Information file contains the following 9 sections: (1) Notation; (2) Data pipeline; (3) Model architecture; (4) Auxiliary heads; (5) Training and inference; (6) Evaluation; (7) Differences to AlphaFold2 and AlphaFold-Multimer; (8) Supplemental Results; and (9) Appendix: CCD Code and PDB ID tables.

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Abramson, J., Adler, J., Dunger, J. et al. Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w

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