The medium of expression for your essay is the written word, in the form of the traditional 'essay' or 'research paper' or whatever your institution labels it.
I assume, pretty much, that if you are going into Christian ministry and you have chosen to study theology, then you don't mind a few words here and there. In fact, I reckon it is part of your vocation to be a student of words. You will be exercising teaching gifts using words. So knowing how to communicate in written language is skill worth honing.
It is all about judging what register to use in the right situation. What do I mean? Register is basically how you pitch your langauge according to the context. Is it highly formal? Is it chatty? Is it conversational? That will be a factor of the register.
The essay is an exercise in formal writing in an academic setting. That is, you are seeking as much precision as you can muster and assuming that your audience is a very well educated person in the field that you are writing in. You can use technical langauge, complex sentences, and elevated vocabulary - in fact, you ought to. You can assume that your reader will work hard to try and understand you.
You are aiming to be persuasive - but you are not in the pulpit. Many theological students find it hard to step out of the pulpit, I've noticed! Persuasion in this instance doesn't mean the kind of hyped-up rhetorical language you might use in a sermon. In fact, the opposite is true here: you need to keep the emotive impact of your words in check. Persuasion is by dint of reasoning here. Leave the hyperbole for Sunday.
But none of this absolves you of your responsibility to be as clear as you possibly can. Clarity doesn't mean simplicity, or dumbing-it-down. It doesn't mean writing a conversational way. But it does mean making your sentences hang together well, making your paragraphs clearly about something and giving us an obvious sense of where you are going in the essay. You aren't out to win a Pulitzer prize, here. It doesn't need to be fancy prose. But is amazing how a bit of attenton to the writing really helps the essay - because to write well is the think well.
So, my first piece of advice will be: re-read your work, aloud if you can. And ask yourself: is it clear to me what I mean? If you can't follow what you are saying don't expect that I will. You need to use your ears: does it sound right? That's always a good first test of your writing.
There a couple of the things you can do to make your writing more clear:
1) See if you can cut your sentences in half. Sometimes sentences just try to do too much, and the structure of the sentence can't bear the weight of meaning your are forcing on it. The full stop (period) is your friend.
2) take care how you use the 'connector' words: but, yet, however, therefore, nevertheless. These words are important cues to the reader. But they can also be completely confusing, especially if they are used in a haphazard fashion.
NB 'however' is not a conjunction. You don't use it in the middle of a sentence to co-ordinate two thoughts. It is an adverb, and usually goes first or second in a sentence and is followed by a comma.
3) Start each paragraph with a sentence indicating what the paragraph is about. End each paragraph by saying what you have just concluded from the paragraph.
4) prefer active to passive. This hint is a standard of writing textbooks everywhere. It isn't a 100% rule. But you save words by using the active. For that reason I say to you that
And it is clear.
(To be continued)
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