The most important part about writing an essay is selecting what you want to write about, or what your professors will often refer to as ‘defining your motive.’ The motive is the underlying question your essay is trying to answer. Once you have a clear idea of what that is, writing your essay is simply stating what your answer to the question is (your thesis) and several logical points to support that answer (your body paragraphs). Creating a motive for an academic essay, however, can be incredibly difficult.
Motive outside of the classroom
Outside of the classroom, your motive is simply the reason why you decided to open your Word document to start writing. In this post, for example, my motive is to help students write essays more easily, since I struggled with essay writing and wanted to pass my learnings on to others. It’s not difficult to imagine motives for non-academic writing in your life. You might write a speech for your grandfather’s birthday because he has accomplished many things. Or you might email your parents while on vacation because they are anxious to hear how you are doing. Regardless of the topic, your motive comes from an actual need or passion that requires you to write.
The trouble with picking a motive for your essay
When writing an essay for a course, there is usually one genuine motive:
“I must write this essay to pass the course”
Not so inside the classroom. When writing an essay for a course, there is usually only one genuine motive: “I must write this essay to pass the course.” Sadly, this perfectly logical motive won’t work for your essay. You must find something exciting to write about a topic that you may not even like in the first place.
So what’s the best way to go about doing this? While most writing classes hand out lists of possible motives, many of these motives are esoteric and complicated. They range from placing your argument into scholarly discussion (which requires even more reading!) or identifying a ‘tension’ in the work. These are all useful suggestions on the surface, but their usefulness tends to disappear when your essay is due in two days and you are struggling to come up with a topic to write about. The difficulty in selecting a motive is that you must select something that is not obvious to the average reader. But how can you reliably pick a topic the average reader would not find obvious when you yourself are an average reader?
Three ways to choose a motive for your essay
Take a second-pass through the work
First, reread the work you are writing about. Highlight anything that you noticed on the second pass that you did not notice on the first. To me, this is the easiest way to discover a motive. Art has multiple layers of meaning, and our understanding of them changes or deepens the more we interact with them. It is this property of art that enables essays to be written about it in the first place.
For example, IRH has been a fan of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban since childhood. It was only after re-reading it as adults, however, that we realized the parallels between Harry’s friend group and his father’s throughout the book. For instance, each group can be clearly identified with animals. Harry’s father’s friends are Animagi / werewolves, whereas Ron and Hermione’s pets both feature prominently in the story. Exploring how the use of animals connects Harry’s friend group to his father’s could be the subject of an essay.
Place your subject in its historical context
You can also place your subject in its historical context, even if it is only a few years old. The impact of doing this is two-fold. First, not every reader will be familiar with the historical context of the work. Second, understanding the historical context of the work will deepen your own understanding of it. This makes it easier to identify topics to write about.
Take the Merchant of Venice for example. On first reading, the book is about the struggles of Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio against the Jewish lender, Shylock. If you place the work in the 16th century context Shakespeare was writing in, however, the work can have new meaning. During that time, financial transactions were shifting from patrons to money lenders. Patronage relationships, like that of Antonio and Bassanio, were based on good faith agreements. Lending relationships were strictly based on the law. In this light, you might write an essay about how Shylock’s otherness and inflexibility may not simply be due to his Jewishness, but rather reflect societal anxieties about the shift from the old form of lending to the new.
Connect to other authors or works you know
Another source of motive is connecting the work you are writing about to other authors or artists you know. For instance, in Theodore Dressier’s The Financier, the author’s sympathy towards his profit-driven, cutthroat protagonist is very similar to Ayn Rand’s treatment of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, despite the fact that Dressier was a die-hard socialist. Why Ayn Rand and a prominent socialist would share similar attitudes could be the subject of an essay. The only caveat here is that you should not mention the other work in your essay, since readers will not know the work. Instead, you use the other work in your own thinking to come up with a motivating question. (Here, why would a socialist seem to write in support of a corrupt businessman?).
Conclusion
Overall, motive is the most critical piece of an essay, but it can be a difficult concept for many students to grasp, mostly because creating a motive in a scholarly setting feels artificial. By developing a repeatable process for identifying motive, however, writing an essay can feel more manageable.
Ready to tackle the rest of your essay? Check out our article on the essay writing process.
