essay about manchester

Essay writing guide

Introduction.

The subject of how to write a good essay is covered on many other sites and students are encouraged to read a sample of guides for a full understanding.

Recommended reading

• How to write an essay , University of Manchester, Faculty of Humanities Study Skills
• 3rd year project technical writing advice , University of Manchester, School of Computer Science
• William Strunk's elements of style

Examples of additional reading

• Essay writing & report writing , University of Wollongong
• Essay writing , Edinburgh Napier University

Academic essays and articles usually contain 'references'. These can range from a generalised bibliography or list for "further reading" to specific references for particular points in the text. In this last category references are normally indexed either by the first author's name and publication date, e.g. "[Smith97]" or simply numerically "[5]".

• Read how to reference properly and avoid plagiarism

Advice on the subject of plagiarism can be found under the assessments section of this website.

• MyManchester
• Hardware library
• School library
• University library
• Essay writing
• Exam technique
• LaTeX theses
• Ethics (UG)

Platform. The everyday portal for sharing knowledge and intelligence on sustainability across Greater Manchester.

Perspectives essay: manchester – a sustainable future.

In this Perspectives Essay, the Leader of Manchester City Council, Richard Leese, argues that for the foreseeable future a healthy, sustainable future for Manchester and, by association, Greater Manchester depends on maintaining a growth trajectory. This is not growth at any cost. The city should continue to be capable of sustaining human life in a socially acceptable and civilised way. Drawing on evidence from the city’s recent history of urban development, he concludes that Manchester is going in the right direction, and that the city-region is taking the right approach, building consensus and taking people with it, but that the pace of change needs to quicken.

Cities have no automatic right to exist. The world is littered with once great cities that have been reduced to provincial towns, to villages, to ruins, or even to having no visible remnants at all.  For much of the twentieth century Manchester was on a trajectory of decline. Its commercial peak was in the nineteenth century when it was a global commercial powerhouse, truly one of those great cities, but by the recession of the early eighties it would not have been impossible to imagine terminal decline.

The discussion around the sustainability of Manchester begins with the reversal of decades of decline; a new economy has been developed and 2011 census figures show Manchester as the UK’s fastest growing city with a 19% population increase compared to ten years previously.  Cities can be seen as buildings and structures, and they can be seen as the people who populate the place to live or work or play. They can also be seen as an organism and, as such, are never in a steady state. They are either growing or declining, and, certainly for the foreseeable future, a healthy, sustainable future for Manchester depends on maintaining a growth trajectory.

This is not growth at any price. It should go without saying that one of the pre-requisites for a sustainable future is that the city should continue to be capable of sustaining human life in a socially acceptable and, indeed, civilised way. This requires the city to face one of the world’s biggest challenges -- perhaps the biggest -- global warming and climate change.  Manchester: A Certain Future, the city’s stakeholder climate change action plan, forecasts that “Manchester’s climate will change to hotter, drier summers, warmer wetter winters and more intense and frequented episodes of extreme weather such as storms and floods.”  The cynics will no doubt point to this year’s ‘wettest on record’ summer, but there is a stronger case for seeing this as further evidence of the growing instability and unpredictability of our weather patterns and gives strength to the statement that this “should only serve to underline the urgent and immediate need for radical action.  We should adapt for the future, even as we make major cuts in our carbon emissions.”

"It should go without saying that one of the pre-requisites for a sustainable future is that the city should continue to be capable of sustaining human life in a socially acceptable and, indeed, civilised way."

Climate change links us, through fossil fuels, to the necessity of changing the way we utilise all of the planet’s finite resources. These are not issues peculiar to Manchester; nor are they problems the city can solve on its own. However, a key element in guaranteeing our own survival as a healthy thriving city is to ensure that we make, at the very least, our fair share contribution to solving these global challenges. Indeed, with this year’s re-run, ‘twenty years on’, of the Rio Conference, it is clear that nation states are no nearer getting their act together with the urgency required, and cities around the world will have a crucial political role in continuing to push the climate change agenda. On a global issue, in a global economy, Manchester needs to be part of that drive.

Go back twenty years further, to 1972, and the United Nation’s very first conference on Human Environment held in Stockholm; it was there that Indira Ghandi, one of only two Heads of Government to attend, said “Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters.”  We can be certain that there is no way we are going to stem the increasing emissions of China, Brazil, India and other rapidly growing economies unless we can find alternative ways of meeting their populations growing economic aspirations, tackle the grinding poverty that afflicts much of the developing world, and at the same time find low-carbon ways of reviving the faltering economies of the so-called developed world. And there is no scope here for the “West” to take any moral high-ground, as it is still responsible directly and indirectly for most of the world's emissions.

For all our relative affluence, tackling poverty has been the biggest policy driver in Manchester for the last twenty years. A Labour Party policy paper written at that time identified unemployment and low-skill, low-wage employment as the biggest causes of poverty, and job-creation and getting Manchester people into those jobs as the core of any solution.  Then as now, public services were enduring prolonged and savage cuts and so the creation of private sector growth and jobs was the only route to this addressing of the underlying causes of the scourge of poverty.

The link between the economic and social was reinforced a few years later when the City Council, committed to the development of “sustainable neighbourhoods”, commissioned a piece of work to define what such a neighbourhood would look like.  The Council had expected something that would describe a sustainable neighbourhood in terms of a collection of social attributes, but what came back was a starkly economic view.  Once benefit dependency rises above around a third of the population, sustainability cannot be maintained.  Yet again, getting people into jobs that pay decent wages, becomes the primary social determinant. There is a direct link here between environmental and economic equity as poorer people contribute far less to carbon emissions than the wealthy.

The revival of the city has also required an ideological and cultural battle to be fought as to how cities are perceived.  The flight of the bourgeoisie from the heart of our Victorian cities, the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Town & Country Planning Associations promotion of the garden city concept are all part of a hundred and fifty year plus development of a culture of anti-urbanism.   This can be represented as the myth of the rural idyll, the ideal home being the country cottage with honeysuckle growing around the door; but this has been translated into practice as the blight of semi-detached suburbia – and a deep-rooted culture of rural good, urban bad.

The notion of cities as centres of civilisation and the recognition that dense, urban living is inherently more sustainable than urban sprawl had no place in UK planning and development -- witness all the monotonous, low-rise, open plan, cul-de-sac based developments of the nineteen-eighties and nineties.  The challenge to this has been multi-pronged and includes the active promotion of city-living, support for the growth of the night-time economy, and the investment in high quality cultural and leisure facilities at the heart of the city that continues to this day.

One of the great successes of the past two decades has been to once again make urban living not only acceptable but desirable, the epitome of a civilised life-style. However, this still remains predominantly a life-style choice for young urbanites, students, and older people, including retirees whose children, if any, have long since gone. There is still a long way to go in challenging the dominant “mock” ruralisation that pervades our society, and that includes a need to make urban living accessible and desirable for the full population spectrum, including families.

Although the battle to re-energise city living began in the city centre, the first prolonged attempt to achieve this at scale was in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Hulme. Indeed, it could be argued that the modern history of urban development in this country began in Hulme twenty-three years ago.

Hulme had a history of slum clearance going back before the second world war. Most of central Hulme was redeveloped in the nineteen-sixties and seventies according to the fashions of the time. A combination of poor planning and architecture, notwithstanding the architectural awards gained, and of very poor build quality led to the area being regularly labelled as one of the worst residential areas in Europe. Families fled and, although the area developed a particular form of grungy urban chic, in population terms, it was in terminal decline.

In 1990, a north-west based company, AMEC, commissioned a Toronto based planner, Joe Berridge, to produce a spatial ‘vision’ for a new Hulme, and the launch of City Challenge gave the city the opportunity to put the thinking behind that vision into practice.

Hulme pioneered much of what has now become common-place in regeneration thinking -- the use of long-term strategic planning, the rejection of strict zoning, the importance of design and the introduction of mixed-use development. the re-introduction of the street as something that goes somewhere (i.e. no cul-de-sacs), natural surveillance,  clear distinctions between public and private space, design that reflected the historic pattern of the  area especially the street pattern, an approach that integrated physical change with strong people/community-centred social and economic programmes, regeneration icons (e.g. The Hulme Arch), high-density but at the same time private and safe place for families (e.g. gardens), an aspiration for much higher environmental standards. Previous regeneration programmes had dispersed existing populations.  Hulme gave the opportunity for communities to stay together. Hulme Mark 3 wasn’t, and isn’t, perfect, nor is it yet completed, but it is arguably the best and most successful example of large-scale urban redevelopment anywhere in the county.

The lessons of Hulme are reflected in everything that has happened in Manchester since,  starting with the re-planning and re-building of the city centre post-bomb (not yet completed), through the regeneration of East Manchester (not yet completed), to the development of strategic regeneration frameworks that cover every part of the city.  Hulme started off from looking at the physical form but the regeneration was just as much about people as it was about the buildings and space they occupied.

Although the approach to urban development can be very clearly traced back to Hulme City Challenge, it has not been an insular approach.  Just as the original City Challenge drew ideas from best practice across the Atlantic, we have continued to seek out new and better ways of doing thing.  For example, New East Manchester, the Urban Regeneration Company overseeing renewal in the east of the city, established a relationship with Gothenburg in Sweden. They aimed to learn from far superior environmental standards in the built-environment in Scandinavia. At the same time, they wanted to benefit from the far more successful approaches to social cohesion operating in Manchester. This learning from the best is reflected most recently in the master-plan for West Gorton, work supported by a Scandinavian architectural practice, and seeking to make a step change in our environmental standards.

There is often a misconceived tension between physical re-development and soft, people-centred programmes. Successful growth strategies need both working together in tandem.

There are examples of where investment in Manchester didn’t work because there wasn’t that integration. The Miles Platting SRB (Single Regeneration Budget) programme of the nineteen-nineties very much concentrated on investment in people. When it succeeded -- for example, in getting people trained and into work -- all too often the outcome was that those people left the area. Conversely, the Benchill Estate Action Programme improved the condition of property but did nothing to ameliorate the prevailing social and economic conditions, with the result that the estate, since revived by Willow Park local housing company, soon sank back into decay.  However there is a need for programmes that are very much about people. Indeed Manchester: A Certain Future recognised that a large chunk of achieving our emission reduction targets could only be achieved by changing attitudes and behaviours.  The example that follows though is one that is heavily rooted in that broader social and economic analysis.

"There is often a misconceived tension between physical re-development and soft, people-centred programmes. Successful growth strategies need both working together in tandem."

Around four years ago, Manchester’s first State of the City report identified that although average wages in Manchester were the highest in the English Core Cities, residents’ wages were the lowest. This led to the Manchester Partnership establishing the narrowing of that wages gap as a key priority and that in turn led to the Residents Wages Programme.

A piece of research identified, perhaps unsurprisingly, that low-income, benefit dependency is intensely spatially concentrated. The residents’ wages programme was piloted in two very small areas of the city, areas where virtually nobody worked.  The programme explored the most effective ways of making contact with families – working with them to get family members engaged in education, training and work. Though the programme was, in its own terms, successful, the resource required to run it meant it simply wasn’t replicable on a city-wide scale; but the lessons learnt have been applied and can now be very clearly seen in, for example, the troubled families work being rolled out across the whole of North Manchester – the need for genuine multi-agency workers with single assessment and one lead worker, whole family approaches, and assertiveness are all becoming part of new delivery models.

The paper so far has concentrated on the Manchester local authority area rather than the wider conurbation, although it would have been just as easy to talk about the Greater Manchester Climate Strategy, or the whole place community budget work that is going on in all of the city-regions ten districts.  It is pretty obvious that economies and job markets are not constrained by local authorities. In our relatively recent industrial past, workers would have flooded every morning into Trafford Park, largely by bus, and from every part of the conurbation, as now workers flood into the city centre largely by bus, train and tram.  One of the strengths of the Greater Manchester approach has been the recognition that if we are to promote growth and create jobs, we are more likely to be successful if we operate at the level of the real economy, the functional economic area. That understanding has lead to an increasingly strengthened role for the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA) in the fields of economic development, green growth and environmental protection, transport, strategic planning and housing.  In April 2011, the country’s first Combined Authority (CA) came into being, a statutory local authority with each of the ten Greater Manchester districts as members, charged with supporting economic growth across the conurbation .

Even in a relatively short period of time the CA has been remarkably successful – most notably in achieving unprecedented levels of devolution from central government through the first City Deal.  The element of this that has attracted the most attention is the ‘Earn Back’ model, where Greater Manchester gets to share an element of the national tax take generated by growth.  

The Whole Place Community Budget work, referred to previously, builds on the previous government’s Total Place initiative. The work streams involve local government officers working together with a cross-departmental group of civil servants to find new, better, and more cost-effective ways of solving some of urban Britain’s most intractable problems.  There are four work streams -- early years, health and social care, troubled families, and reducing offending/re-offending with a cross-cutting theme of worklessness. Again the approaches being used can be traced back to earlier work, such as that on residents’ wages. The methodologies are consistent, primarily early and assertive intervention through a single, integrated cross-agency framework, with a hierarchy of increasingly intense actions.  The work is currently largely small-scale and, although showing much success, the real test will be scaleability.

Back to the City Deal, perhaps less attention has been given to the range of proposals aimed at low-carbon economic growth than the innovative Earn Back scheme. Prior to the establishment of the CA, AGMA, though remaining a voluntary association, had re-constituted itself as a joint committee of local authorities supported by a number of commissions including the Environment Commission. The commission was chaired by a council leader, but as well as a small number of local authority members, had a wider cross-sectoral membership.  Prior to the City Deal, and as part of agreements with the previous government, AGMA  through the Environment Commission, had developed a number of ambitious programmes, including its climate change strategy and, related to that, a building retrofit programme with an estimated resource requirement of £6billion.  

The retrofit programme, still in the development phase, is an example of something that would hit all the city-region key policy areas.  It would create thousands of jobs, new companies, new techniques and technologies, it would improve the attractiveness of Manchester as a place to live, it would cut emissions, and reduce fuel bills and, as a consequence, fuel poverty. The City Deal includes a joint venture with the Green Investment Bank aimed at building and funding a project pipeline which, as well as retrofit and new-build, might include heat networks, local energy generation, low-emission transport  (electric, hybrid, charging points) and so on.  It is an ambitious programme, and to deliver it the CA has established the Low-Carbon Hub, with seven thematic and cross-cutting sub-groups to drive the programme forward, co-ordinated by a Hub Board to provide enhanced leadership capacity as well as seeking to draw in the scale of investment needed -- no small task in the current climate.

At the core of the Greater Manchester approach is the Greater Manchester Strategy. The strategy was published in 2009, following an extensive independent study of the Manchester economy published as the Manchester Independent Economic Review.  The review gave Greater Manchester an incredibly robust evidence base on which to build its forward plans.  However, in that short number of years, the world has changed so much that the Greater Manchester Strategy is already out-of-date and in the process of being revised. Although the city-region has managed to maintain economic momentum through the credit crunch and subsequent recession, diminished resources make the task of keeping up with, never mind staying ahead of international competition ever harder. There are no easy answers to this dilemma, but the city-region has never ceased becoming ever more ingenious and innovative in finding solutions to the problems we face.

"Although the city-region has managed to maintain economic momentum through the credit crunch and subsequent recession, diminished resources make the task of keeping up with, never mind staying ahead of international competition ever harder."

Though the strategy is being reviewed, the vision remains the same, as do the outcomes that indicate whether we are being successful or not.  Measures include cutting emissions by 40% by 2020, eliminating the productivity gap between Manchester and the South-East, getting economic activity rates and worklessness to better than the national average, massively improving our skill levels, particularly in our young people. Progress indicators are more difficult because of the time lag in most economic and environmental data sets, and a lot of work is being put into developing a useful set of real-time indicators.

Manchester is on a journey. All the evidence suggests it is going in the right direction, but not fast enough, economically or environmentally. In developing the institutions to drive and support change, the city-region has taken an evolutionary approach, building consensus and taking people with us. That evolutionary approach needs to continue, but the pace needs to quicken.  The CA, although a direct successor to previous voluntary arrangements, is a new body and will inevitably take some time to mature, but is undoubtedly the key to the way forward.  Stepping up the pace will only happen if the CA’s ten constituent authorities put the time and effort in to make it happen.  In most respects, the policies and structures we need are in place. Now we need to make them work for us.

This Perspectives Essay was written as part of the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform's (GM LIP) 'Mapping the Urban Knowledge Arena' project. The GMLIP is one of five global platforms of Mistra Urban Futures, a centre committed to more sustainable urban pathways in cities. All views belong to the author/s alone.

Contributor Profile

Sir Richard Leese is a Labour Politician, Leader of Manchester City Council, Councillor for Crumpsall and a Manchester City fan.

• Style Guide

Thanks for coming to Confidentials.

Looks like you might have an AdBlocker on. Please whitelist confidentials.com to continue to our site and enjoy an Ad-Light experience.

The story of Manchester architecture: Part three 1850-1894

Jonathan Schofield and the battle of the styles

We finished off the last chapter with the creation of the ‘Manchester palazzo’ style by Charles Barry and we need to continue with it a little longer. In that instance we talked about a club, The Athenaeum, where it began, and Gregan’s beautiful bank on St Ann’s Street. However perhaps the most pertinent given Manchester’s trading status was the use of the model in textile warehouses. 

Whether you look at the proportions outside or the internal decorations… there is nothing like it… in any part of Europe

The simple but stately design of the Renaissance model allowed plenty of light into buildings whilst not wasting too much space on decoration. The main salesrooms with cotton samples were on the upper floors, the first floor provided the counting house and the administration, whilst the lower basement contained the machinery, the steam engines and the boilers. A large iron gateway led from the rear or side through which laden cotton carts left. The heavy carts cracked stone kerbs so iron kerbs are a feature in Manchester streets, especially in the warehouse areas.

This picture below shows one of the elegant Princess Street buildings by Clegg and Knowles, 1869. As C.R. Reilly (1924), described: ‘(the) warehouses represent the essentials of her trade, the very reason for her existence. They are too near to her heart, for any light treatment. Hence their simplicity, strength, and sincerity, and consequently their real beauty.’ 

Much of central Manchester is still defined by warehouse architecture from the Northern Quarter down Mosley Street, Portland Street and Whitworth Street to and including Oxford Street and Great Bridgewater Street.

The ‘palazzo,’ as with all art and architectural fashions, was never a pure ideal and often was simply a frame from which to hang off a variety of designs: an essay in showmanship. This led to remarkable structures such as Travis and Magnall’s Watt's Warehouse (1858), now the Britannia Hotel, the greatest in scale of the textile warehouses occupied by a single company and a cocktail of architectural styles including Italian, French, Elizabethan and even Egyptian motifs. The present occupant, the seedy Britannia hotel doesn't do it any favours, but an idea of the ebullience of the Manchester cottontots (the nickname for the textile millionaires) is in evidence with the gorgeous grand staircase that climbs, turns and then rises over itself in a series of Venetian bridges.

Edward Walters was a fine ‘palazzo’ architect, building some lovely warehouses on Portland Street and Charlotte Street but we leave warehouses again for his two best ‘palazzos.’ His masterpiece was the Free Trade Hall (1856), the main façade of which survives in the Edwardian Hotel. The balance and grace of this building have rarely been equalled in the city. The Manchester and Salford Bank (1860), now the Royal Bank of Scotland, on Mosley Street, isn’t far behind but here there’s more commercial bombast. 

By the late 1850s Manchester had changed completely from the place it had been in 1800, even 1840. Industry had already arrived by 1800 but it was still recognisably a town of the eighteenth century – it was still a product of the old ways. By 1850 Manchester could not have been confused for anywhere else, in effect it was a city state - confident of its place in the world and attempting to control its own destiny.

The change is graphically illustrated in William Wyld's 1852 painting  Manchester from Kersal Moor , where the foreground shows a traditional English country scene but the background is Manchester and Salford and a world changed with the old ways scorched away in the furnace of industry. 

The sense of city confidence and pride in its position was reflected in the pioneering Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, the first major temporary blockbuster art show and arguably still the biggest ever, with 16,000 works placed in an exhibition hall in Old Trafford.

The pride was also reflected in the architectural practices. Manchester begins to get dynasties of designers. The most prominent nationally was that begun by Alfred Waterhouse and continued by his sons (although Waterhouse did decamp to London). In 1859, at the age of 29, the Liverpool-born, Manchester-trained architect won the commission to build the Assize Courts in the city. This essay in modern Gothic was a total success. The Courts were sadly demolished after bomb damage during WWII. It was followed by Manchester Town Hall (1877) – described as ‘a classic of its age’ - and the Victoria University (1887), now the University of Manchester, both in Gothic plus numerous other buildings.

Manchester Town Hall remains the poster-boy of the city's Victorian architecture, it is a candidate for the Victorian building par excellence – the whole age summed up in one: the extravagance, the energy, the self-belief and the achievement.

At the opening banquet in 1877, MP John Bright described the way the city felt about the new building: "With regard to this edifice, it is truly a municipal palace. Whether you look at the proportions outside or the internal decorations… there is nothing like it… in any part of Europe."

The main picture at the top of the page is of the Great Hall in Manchester Town Hall.

Waterhouse’s contemporary was Thomas Worthington who began a practice which still survives in the city. His contribution straddles both buildings and monuments in a variety of Gothic styles such as the Albert Memorial (1862), the Memorial Hall (1866) and the City Police and Sessions Court (1875), Minshull Street, now Crown Courts.

The middle years of the nineteenth century have been called the Battle of the Styles in Britain, an often passionate debate between those who favoured Gothic architecture and those who favoured the Classical, and its various offshoots. In public buildings in Manchester, unlike in Liverpool, the Gothic boxed the ears of Classical.

No doubt the new money industrialists and businessmen found it warmer and more charming than the colder purities of the other style. Edward Salomans, Manchester’s most prominent Jewish architect (who had designed the Art Treasures building pictured above), must have felt the same, or at least his clients did. His best building the Reform Club (1871) is in splendid Venetian Gothic. Gothic still cast a shadow over the end of the century when Basil Champneys designed the last great flowering of Gothic in the UK with John Ryland’s Library (opened 1900), a tour-de-force in red sandstone. 

This extravagant building is a virtuoso performance in Gothic, capturing again some of the freedom and flair of the Gothick buildings of the early part of the nineteenth century (see chapter two) within, of course, a scholarly discipline. John Rylands Library is the firework display at the end of the whole British neo-Gothic revival. It's an astonishing way to bow out. 

Manchester Ship Canal had opened in 1894 and with a general upturn in business a building boom hit Manchester. The steel framed building hit the city at the same time. The buildings in the late 1890s until the outbreak of WWI in 1914 are some of the most bombastic in the city. We’ll cover the years from the Ship Canal opening and also take a look at what was happening in domestic architecture and planning in the next chapter. 

Jonathan Schofield offers regular tours of the city. Gift vouchers can be purchased for the second half of 2020. With every voucher people receive a daily weekday gift. AND NOW there are Zoom tours including one looking specifically at architecture. These are witty, fact-filled and allows you to see the city from your sofa. For more details click here.

Like this? 

The story of manchester architecture: part one, the story of manchester architecture: part two.

• In this Story
• John Rylands Library
• Manchester town hall
• architecture
• Free Trade Hall
• Edwardian Hotel
• Alberts Chop House
• manchester history
• Alfred waterhouse
• Manchester Ship Canal

Things to do in Manchester this April

Northern restaurant & bar 2024: simon rogan & tom barnes discuss plans, 'it's all about the dining experience. no distractions': wing's reopens following refurbishment, most popular, this city: cellular love, bridge street congestion, emerald mosaics, old trafford imagined, launch night: the mezz at ao arena, seven of the best european music festivals to visit this year, coco loco: union co-living launch, gallowswayed: rochdale falls to a demagogue's magic.

Jonathan Schofield stays up late to witness the most batshit crazy by-election in recent UK...

Co-op Live to host 2024 MTV EMAs

Manchester hosting 30th edition of 'music's biggest global celebration'

Pretty Woman The Musical, reviewed

Sarah Tierney is pretty impressed by the musical adaptation of the 80s romance

A Chat with Stanley Chow

David Adamson talks with the illustrator and artist about his exhibition at The Edge in...

• Facebook Icon
• Twitter Icon

In Working-Class Manchester, Friedrich Engels Became a Revolutionary

• Back Issues

New issue out now. Subscribe to our print edition today.

Friedrich Engels was just 22 when he was sent to England to help run the family firm. His father hoped this would draw him away from radical ideas — but in industrial Manchester, young Friedrich instead saw the suffering, and the power, of a growing working class.

Upon his birth, two hundred years ago, Friedrich Engels was neither an Englishman nor a likely revolutionary. Today, his status as an agitator, reformer, and adopted son of Manchester grows stronger by the day. (Wikimedia Commons)

In October 1842, a wealthy businessman from the Rhine province of Prussia aired his grievances about his wayward son. “[He] is like a scabby sheep in a flock and openly opposes the beliefs of his forefathers,” he wrote in a letter. “I hope however to give him plenty of work to do and — wherever he may be — I will arrange for him to be very carefully watched so that he does not do anything to endanger his future career.”

A Christian Pietist and strict disciplinarian, Friedrich Engels Sr was naive to think he could quell his eldest son’s revolutionary instincts. Already a Hegelian philosopher and recent convert to communism, this twenty-two-year-old’s Weltanschauung (or “worldview”) had long outgrown parental sway. Yet the senior Engels persisted. One month after threatening “plenty of work,” he sent his son to Salford, then on the outskirts of Manchester, to manage a cotton mill that he part-owned. This might have been a good use of man power — but as a means of deterring young Friedrich from pursuing a life of revolution, his ploy came up remarkably short.

Had he declined the job at Ermen & Engels, situated in the heartland of industrial England, the trajectory of modern socialist thought would look rather different. An autodidact from a young age, Friedrich saw his father’s demands as a golden opportunity to glean firsthand experience of the world’s most advanced industrial economy. Two centuries since his birth, Engels’s status as a colossus of revolutionary socialism can be traced right back to his decision to agree to come to Manchester — allowing him a direct, and not only theoretical, education in the exploitation the working class faced.

Meeting the Workers

In the months leading up to his move, Engels had increasingly immersed himself in radical journalism and left-wing politics. He became heavily interested in the rising class conflict, regularly contributing to Rheinische Zeitung , a German newspaper whose editorial line was soon radicalized by a young Hegelian called Karl Marx. Having set off for England via the great port city of Bremen — where he penned political texts as Friedrich Oswald — Engels stopped off in Cologne in October 1842 to the staff at the paper. A first meeting with his future friend Marx was curiously unremarkable, but the political philosophy of one of the editors, Moses Hess, left a lasting imprint on the young thinker. “Engels was a revolutionary to the core before we met, but when he left me he was a passionate communist,” Hess remembered.

By the time Engels reached England in November 1842, it appeared to be the cusp of social revolution. Just weeks previously, a thwarted general strike by the Chartists — a mass working-class movement demanding male suffrage and annual parliaments — had displayed the seismic proportions of the class struggle in England, giving an excited young Engels a real-world sense of workers’ potential power. Yet such news from afar paled in comparison to what he saw with his own eyes.

Engels was not naive to workers’ conditions: indeed, he had seen exploitation and destitution as a young apprentice in the industrial cities of Wuppertal and Bremen. “Terrible poverty prevails among the lower classes, particularly the factory workers in Wuppertal,” he said about the former city in one letter. “Syphilis and lung diseases are so widespread as to be barely credible.”

In Manchester, he was routinely exposed to the brutal machinations of the capitalist system in the slums and manufacturing establishments of the city. In the Old Town district, he described a public bathroom as being so squalid that “the inhabitants of the court can only enter or leave the court if they are prepared to wade through puddles of stale urine and excrement.” From poverty wages and bad conditions to rampant child labor and low life expectancy, the Victorian gospel of moral and economic progress was revealed to be fundamentally corrupt.

Engels was already a theorist: his 1843 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy provided the catalyst for Marx’s major studies over the next four decades (his friend later referred to this essay as a “brilliant sketch”). But a text born in Manchester — the first substantial articulation of Engels’s revolutionary goals — endures as one of his most vital works. First published in Leipzig in 1845, The Conditions of the Working Class in England translated firsthand contact with worker oppression into a sweeping analysis of the evolution of industrial capitalism. Writing at the exact moment that the modern industrial city began to emerge, Engels’s study was an extraordinary document of not just the proletariat’s suffering, but its rising political awareness.

In the introduction to the work, the author directly addressed the working class, with whom he fully sympathized despite the noted conflict of his day job at Ermen & Engels. “I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors,” he said. “I have done so: I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle-classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain Working-Men; I am both glad and proud of having done so.”

Any self-congratulatory tone aside, Engels’s good intentions — and considerable efforts — were self-evident in The Conditions of the Working Class in England. Called “ one of the greatest chronicles of the industrial experience” by biographer Tristram Hunt, it swiftly propelled his name among socialists, as an authority on the direct social implications of modern industrialization. In 1895, following Engels’s death, Lenin succinctly summed up what set it apart: “[He] was the first to say that the proletariat is not only a suffering class; that it is, in fact, the disgraceful economic condition of the proletariat that drives it irresistibly forward and compels it to fight for its ultimate emancipation. And the fighting proletariat will help itself .”

The sea change that occurred within Engels during his first spell in England between November 1842 to August 1844 defined the rest of his life and career. Those two years were the making of a revolutionary democrat and a revolutionary realist who devoted his life to struggling for the oppressed. While piecing together Das Kapital in London in 1863, Marx, too, recognized this as a golden age for his closest confidant. “What power, what incisiveness and what passion drove you to work in those days,” Marx wrote in a letter. “That was a time when you were never worried by academic scholarly reservations! Those were the days when you made the reader feel that your theories would become hard facts if not tomorrow then at any rate on the day after.”

Capitalism by Day, Communism by Night

As the ungovernable eldest son of a family of German industrialists, Engels was seemingly fated for a life of considerable cognitive dissonance. But the double life he actively chose to lead — contributing to capitalist oppression during the day and working to realize a communist revolution by night — remains a sticking point when it comes to his legacy. It’s a conflict that extended into his personal affairs, not least in his covert, twenty-year relationship with Mary Burns, a working-class Irish woman whose life experience had marked influence on his major works. Writing to Marx — one of the few individuals who knew the ins and outs of his clandestine second life — Engels tried to convince himself of his duplicity: “I live nearly all the time with Mary so as to save money,” he said. “Unfortunately I cannot manage without lodgings; if I could I would live with her all the time.”

On the upside, Engels’s double-dealing paid some major dividends. Not only did the statistical insights obtained from his managerial perch in Manchester become notable examples of advanced industry in Das Kapital, Engels was a critical source of financial help in funding the research of Marx’s epic critique of the modern market economy. Yet intellectual collaboration between the two took precedence. When the London-based Marx visited in the summer of 1845, two years before they composed The Communist Manifesto , it was in the Reading Room of Manchester’s Chetham’s Library that the pair’s unity of purpose blossomed.

Upon his birth, two hundred years ago, Engels was neither an Englishman nor a likely revolutionary. Today, his status as an agitator, reformer, and adopted son of Manchester grows stronger by the day — not least after a Soviet-era statue of him was erected in the city in 2017. But he is not just a dead figure monumentalized in stone. For even now, his words in the introduction to The Conditions of the Working Class in England feel like a firm invitation to focus on the bigger picture, and to push forward in the struggle, harder than ever before: “Much remains to be undergone; be firm, be undaunted — your success is certain, and no step you will have to take in your onward march will be lost to our common cause, the cause of humanity!”

FBMH 2019-20

Student Handbooks

Appendix 5: A practical guide to writing essays

Writing an essay is a big task that will be easier to manage if you break it down into five main tasks as shown below:

An essay-writing Model in 5 steps

• Analyse the question

What is the topic?

What are the key verbs?

Question the question—brainstorm and probe

What information do you need?

How are you going to find information?

Find the information

Make notes and/or mind maps.

• Plan and sort

Arrange information in a logical structure

Plan sections and paragraphs

Introduction and conclusion

• Edit (and proofread)

For sense and logical flow

For grammar and spelling.

For length.

My Learning Essentials offers a number of online resources and workshops that will help you to understand the importance of referencing your sources, use appropriate language and style in your writing, write and proofread your essays. For more information visit the writing skills My Learning Essentials pages: http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/services-and-support/students/support-for-your-studies/my-learning-essentials/

Many students write great essays — but not on the topic they were asked about. First, look at the main idea or topic in the question. What are you going to be writing about? Next, look at the verb in the question — the action word. This verb, or action word, is asking you to do something with the topic.

Here are some common verbs or action words and explanations:

Once you have analysed the question, start thinking about what you need to find out. It’s better and more efficient to have a clear focus for your research than to go straight to the library and look through lots of books that may not be relevant.

Start by asking yourself, ‘What do I need to find out?’ Put your ideas down on paper. A mind map is a good way to do this. Useful questions to start focusing your research are: What? Why? When? How? Where? Who?

• Refer to the advice given in Writing and Referencing Skills for methods to search for information.

First, scan through your source . Find out if there’s any relevant information in what you are reading. If you’re reading a book, look at the contents page, any headings, and the index. Stick a Post-It note on useful pages.

Next, read for detail . Read the text to get the information you want. Start by skimming your eyes over the page to pick our relevant headings, summaries, words. If it’s useful, make notes.

  Making notes

There are two rules when you are making notes:

• Note your source so that you can find it again and write your references at the end of the essay if you use that information. Use Endnote (see the section on Referencing), or note down the following:
• page reference
• date of publication
• publisher’s name (book)
• place where it was published (book or journal)
• the journal number, volume and date (journal)
• Make brief notes rather than copy text , but if you feel an extract is very valuable put it in quotation marks so that when you write your essay, you’ll know that you have to put it in your own words. Failing to rewrite the text in your own words would be plagiarism.
• For more information on plagiarism, refer to the Second Level Handbook and the My Learning Essentials Plagiarism Resource http://libassets.manchester.ac.uk/mle/avoiding-plagiarism/.

Everyone will make notes differently as it suits them. However, the aim of making notes when you are researching an essay is to use them when you write the essay. It is therefore important that you can:

• Read your notes
• Find their source
• Determine what the topics and main points are on each note (highlight the main ideas, key points or headings).
• Compose your notes so you can move bits of information around later when you have to sort your notes into an essay.

For example:

• Write/type in chunks (one topic for one chunk) with a space between them so you can cut your notes up later, or
• write the main topics or questions you want to answer on separate pieces of paper before you start making notes. As you find relevant information, write it on the appropriate page. (This takes longer as you have to write the source down a number of times, but it does mean you have ordered your notes into headings.)

Sort information into essay plans

You’ve got lots of information now: how do you put it all together to make an essay that makes sense? As there are many ways to sort out a huge heap of clothes (type of clothes, colour, size, fabric…), there are many ways of sorting information. Whichever method you use, you are looking for ways to arrange the information into groups and to order the groups into a logical sequence . You need to play around with your notes until you find a pattern that seems right and will answer the question.

• Find the main points in your notes, put them on a separate page – a mind map is a good way to do this – and see if your main points form any patterns or groups.
• Is there a logical order? Does one thing have to come after another? Do points relate to one another somehow? Think about how you could link the points.
• Using the information above, draw your essay plan. You could draw a picture, a mind map, a flow chart or whatever you want. Or you could build a structure by using bits of card that you can move around.
• Select and put the relevant notes into the appropriate group so you are ready to start writing your first draft.

The essay has four main parts:

• introduction
• references.

People usually write the introduction and conclusion after they have written the main body of the essay, so we have put them in that order.

For more information on essay writing visit the My Learning Essentials web pages:

https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/learning-objects/mle/packages/writing/

  Main Body

Structure . The main body should have a clear structure. Depending on the length of the essay, you may have just a series of paragraphs, or sections with headings, or possibly even subsections. In the latter case, make sure that the hierarchy of headings is obvious so that the reader doesn’t get lost.

Flow . The main body of the essay answers the question and flows logically from one key point to another (each point needs to be backed up by evidence [experiments, research, texts, interviews, etc …] that must be referenced). You should normally write one main idea per paragraph and the main ideas in your essay should be linked or ‘signposted’. Signposts show readers where they are going, so they don’t get lost. This lets the reader know how you are going to tackle the idea, or how one idea is linked with the one before it or after it.

Some signpost words and phrases are:

• ‘These changes . . . “
• ‘Such developments
• ‘This
• ‘In the first few paragraphs . . . “
• ‘I will look in turn at. . . ‘
• ‘However, . . . “
• ‘Similarly’
• ‘But’.

Figures: purpose . You should try to include tables, diagrams, and perhaps photographs in your essay. Tables are valuable for summarising information, and are most likely to impress if they show the results of relevant experimental data. Diagrams enable the reader to visualise things, replacing the need for lengthy descriptions. Photographs must be selected with care, to show something meaningful. Nobody will be impressed by a picture of a giraffe – we all know what one looks like, so the picture would be mere decoration. But a detailed picture of a giraffe’s markings might be useful if it illustrates a key point.

Figures: labelling, legends and acknowledgment . Whenever you use a table, diagram or image in your essay you must:

• cite the source
• make sure that the legend and explanation are adapted to your purpose.

Checklist for the main body of text

• Does your text have a clear structure?
• Does the text follow a logical sequence so that the argument flows?
• Does your text have both breadth and depth – i.e. general coverage of the major issues with in-depth treatment of particularly important points?
• Does your text include some illustrative experimental results?
• Have you chosen the diagrams or photographs carefully to provide information and understanding, or are the illustrations merely decorative?
• Are your figures acknowledged properly? Did you label them and include legend and explanation?

    Introduction

The introduction comes at the start of the essay and sets the scene for the reader. It usually defines clearly the subject you will address (e.g. the adaptations of organisms to cold environments), how you will address this subject (e.g. by using examples drawn principally from the Arctic zone) and what you will show or argue (e.g. that all types of organism, from microbes through to mammals, have specific adaptations that fit them for life in cold environments). The length of an introduction depends on the length of your essay, but is usually between 50 to 200 words

Remember that reading the introduction constitutes the first impression on your reader (i.e. your assessor!). Therefore, it should be the last section that you revise at the editing stage, making sure that it leads the reader clearly into the details of the subject you have covered and that it is completely free of typos and spelling mistakes.

  Check-list for the Introduction

• Does your introduction start logically by telling the reader what the essay is about – for example, the various adaptations to habitat in the bear family?
• Does your introduction outline how you will address this topic – for example, by an overview of the habitats of bears, followed by in-depth treatment of some specific adaptations?
• Is it free of typos and spelling mistakes?

Conclusion  

An essay needs a conclusion. Like the introduction, this need not be long: 50 to 200 words long, depending on the length of the essay. It should draw the information together and, ideally, place it in a broader context by personalising the findings, stating an opinion or supporting a further direction which may follow on from the topic. The conclusion should not introduce facts in addition to those in the main body.

Check-list for the Conclusion

• Does your conclusion sum up what was said in the main body?
• If the title of the essay was a question, did you give a clear answer in the conclusion?
• Does your conclusion state your personal opinion on the topic or its future development or further work that needs to be done? Does it show that you are thinking further?

  References

In all scientific writing you are expected to cite your main sources of information. Scientific journals have their own preferred (usually obligatory) method of doing this. The piece of text below shows how you can cite work in an essay, dissertation or thesis. Then you supply an alphabetical list of references at the end of the essay. The Harvard style of referencing adopted at the University of Manchester will be covered in the Writing and Referencing Skills unit in Semester 3. For more information refer to the Referencing Guide from the University Library ( http://subjects.library.manchester.ac.uk/referencing/referencing-harvard ).

Citations in the text

Jones and Smith (1999) showed that the ribosomal RNA of fungi differs from that of slime moulds. This challenged the previous assumption that slime moulds are part of the fungal kingdom (Toby and Dean, 1987). However, according to Bloggs et al . (1999) the slime moulds can still be accommodated in the fungal kingdom for convenience. Slime moulds are considered part of the Eucarya domain by Todar (2012).

Reference list at the end of the essay:

List the references in alphabetical order and if you have several publications written by the same author(s) in the same year, add a letter (a,b,c…) after the year to distinguish between them. Bloggs, A.E., Biggles, N.H. and Bow, R.T. (1999). The Slime Moulds . 2 nd edn. London and New York: Academic Press.

Todar K. (2012) Overview Of Bacteriology. Available at: http://textbookofbacteriology.net, [Accessed 15 November 2013].

Jones, B.B. and Smith, J.O.E. (1999). Ribosomal RNA of slime moulds, Journal of Ribosomal RNA 12, 33-38.

Toby F.S. and Dean P.L. (1987). Slime moulds are part of the fungal kingdom, in Edwards A.E. and Kane Y. (eds.) The Fungal Kingdom. Luton: Osbert Publishing Co., pp. 154-180 .

Endnote : This is an electronic system for storing and retrieving references that you will learn about in the Writing and Referencing Skills (WRS) unit. It is very powerful and simple to use, but you must always check that the output is consistent with the instructions given in this section.

Visit the My Learning Essentials online resource for a guide to using EndNote: https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/learning-objects/mle/endnote-guide/

(we recommend EndNote online if you wish to use your own computer).

Note that journals have their own house style so there will be minor differences between them, particularly in their use of punctuation, but all reference lists for the same journal will be in the same format.

First Draft

When you write your first draft, keep two things in mind:

• Length: you may lose marks if your essay is too long. Ensure therefore that your essay is within the page limit that has been set.
• Expression: don’t worry about such matters as punctuation, spelling or grammar at this stage. You can get this right at the editing stage. If you put too much time into getting these things right at the drafting stage, you will have less time to spend on thinking about the content, and you will be less willing to change it when you edit for sense and flow at the editing stage.

  Writing style

The style of your essay should fit the task or the questions asked and be targeted to your reader. Just as you are careful to use the correct tone of voice and language in different situations so you must take care with your writing. Generally writing should be:

• Make sure that you write exactly what you mean in a simple way.
• Write briefly and keep to the point. Use short sentences. Make sure that the meaning of your sentences is obvious.
• Check that you would feel comfortable reading your essay if you were actually the reader.
• Make sure that you have included everything of importance. Take care to explain or define any abbreviations or specialised jargon in full before using a shortened version later. Do not use slang, colloquialisms or cliches in formal written work.

When you are editing your essay, you will need to bear in mind a number of things. The best way to do this, without forgetting something, is to edit in ‘layers’, using a check-list to make sure you have not forgotten anything.

Check-list for Style  

• Tone – is it right for the purpose and the receiver?
• Clarity – is it simple, clear and easy to understand?
• Complete – have you included everything of importance?

  Check-list for Sense

• Does your essay make sense?
• Does it flow logically?
• Have you got all the main points in?
• Are there bits of information that aren’t useful and need to be chopped out?
• Are your main ideas in paragraphs?
• Are the paragraphs linked to one another so that the essay flows rather than jumps from one thing to another?
• Is it about the right length?

  Check-list for Proofreading

• Are the punctuation, grammar, spelling and format correct?
• If you have written your essay on a word-processor, run the spell check over it.
• Have you referenced all quotes and names correctly?
• Is the essay written in the correct format? (one and a half line spacing, margins at least 2.5cm all around the text, minimum font size 10 point).

School Writer in Residence

The School of Biological Sciences has three ‘Writers in Residence’ who are funded by The Royal Literary Fund. They are:

Susan Barker ( [email protected] )– Thursday and Friday   

Amanda Dalton ( [email protected] )– Monday and Tuesday

Tania Hershman ( [email protected] ) – Wednesday

The writers in residence can help you with any aspect of your writing including things such as ‘‘how do I start?’ ‘how do I structure a complex essay’ ‘ why am I getting poor marks for my essay writing?’

All you need to do is to bring along a piece of your writing and they will discuss with you on a one to one basis how to resolve the problems that you are having with your piece of writing.

The Writers in Residence are based in the Simon Building. Please see the BIOL20000 Blackboard site for further information about the writers’ expertise and instructions for appointment booking.

Tips for your essays

• Wednesday, April 27, 2022
• United Kingdom
• minute read

I remember someone telling me that think of writing an essay as if you’re cooking a dish where each ingredient brings out its own element and flavour in the dish. Similarly, when it comes to essays every paragraph you write has its own significance and contribution that brings out the best in your writing piece. Three words that you should always keep in your mind: short, crisp, and simple. The key is to narrow down your focus, follow these three rules and let your thoughts flow.

Now writing essays may seem like an ordeal but this mostly happens when you haven’t made a mind map or penned down your thoughts on how to tackle a certain topic. It is because of this that a lot of people fail to put their thoughts into words because they skip the preliminary step of thorough brainstorming. Hence, guys always brainstorm, think of different ideas, and be sure as to why you’re working on it rather than focusing on the how’s and what’s. You will never get an essay right at the first attempt unless you’re some genius or a slacker who does not bother thus, always write a first draft including whatever comes to your mind. It is only after this that you proofread your essays numerous times, to filter them out and to keep what is relevant. I would suggest running the essay through someone else (who you trust) just to get another point of view. After the drafts and proofreading is done, it is only then we focus on the technicalities or presenting the dish well. This includes the grammar, credibility, vocabulary, and coherence of the essay which are perhaps the most important elements that make an essay stand out.

A well-written essay makes use of correct grammar paying attention to the slightest of details complemented with a good and strong vocabulary. Each paragraph should be coherent which means, that they should connect well and carry an idea along the way rather than throwing in new ideas in each paragraph. Despite having to use strong vocabulary and phrases the essay should not be too complicated with any jargon or phrases that may change the entire context of the essay. Similarly, nobody likes to read long paragraphs, so make sure you divide them well and they are short and simple. A term which you guys may have heard and has the power to destroy your lives: Plagiarism. Never, I repeat never plagiarise and if you’re taking information from other resources, always cite them and paraphrase them because trust me, you don’t want to get in trouble.

When writing an essay, you must strike a balance between presenting a clear picture of existing knowledge and demonstrating that you understand it well enough to make an independent judgement.

I am Syed Ali, follow my blogs for an insight into life as a Masters student at Alliance MBS.

• Request a brochure
• Chat to a student
• Masters courses

Related blogs

• How to start your own business in two (and a little more) days Tuesday, June 6, 2023
• MSc in Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship profile: Tatiana Melgar Thursday, May 25, 2023
• MSc Financial Management profile: Julia Olberz Wednesday, April 12, 2023

Academic Phrasebank

Being critical.

• GENERAL LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS
• Being cautious
• Classifying and listing
• Compare and contrast
• Defining terms
• Describing trends
• Describing quantities
• Explaining causality
• Giving examples
• Signalling transition
• Writing about the past

As an academic writer, you are expected to be critical of the sources that you use. This essentially means questioning what you read and not necessarily agreeing with it just because the information has been published. Being critical can also mean looking for reasons why we should not just accept something as being correct or true. This can require you to identify problems with a writer’s arguments or methods, or perhaps to refer to other people’s criticisms of these. Constructive criticism goes beyond this by suggesting ways in which a piece of research or writing could be improved. … being against is not enough. We also need to develop habits of constructive thinking. Edward de Bono

Highlighting inadequacies of previous studies

Previous studies of X have not dealt with … Researchers have not treated X in much detail. Such expositions are unsatisfactory because they … Most studies in the field of X have only focused on … Such approaches, however, have failed to address … Previous published studies are limited to local surveys. Half of the studies evaluated failed to specify whether … The research to date has tended to focus on X rather than published studies on the effect of X are not consistent. Smith’s analysis does not take account of …, nor does she examine …

The existing accounts fail to resolve the contradiction between X and Y. Most studies of X have only been carried out in a small number of areas. However, much of the research up to now has been descriptive in nature … The generalisability of much published research on this issue is problematic. Research on the subject has been mostly restricted to limited comparisons of … However, few writers have been able to draw on any systematic research into … Short-term studies such as these do not necessarily show subtle changes over time … Although extensive research has been carried out on X, no single study exists which … However, these results were based upon data from over 30 years ago and it is unclear if … The experimental data are rather controversial, and there is no general agreement about …

Identifying a weakness in a single study or paper

Offering constructive suggestions.

The study would have been more interesting if it had included … These studies would have been more useful if they had focused on … The study would have been more relevant if the researchers had asked … The questionnaire would have been more useful if it had asked participants about … The research would have been more relevant if a wider range of X had been explored

Introducing problems and limitations: theory or argument

Smith’s argument relies too heavily on … The main weakness with this theory is that … The key problem with this explanation is that … However, this theory does not fully explain why … One criticism of much of the literature on X is that … Critics question the ability of the X theory to provide … However, there is an inconsistency with this argument.

A serious weakness with this argument, however, is that … However, such explanations tend to overlook the fact that … One of the main difficulties with this line of reasoning is that … Smith’s interpretation overlooks much of the historical research … Many writers have challenged Smith’s claim on the grounds that … The X theory has been criticised for being based on weak evidence. A final criticism of the theory of X is that it struggles to explain some aspects of …

Introducing problems and limitations: method or practice

The limitation of this approach is that … A major problem with the X method is that … One major drawback of this approach is that … A criticism of this experimental design is that … The main limitation of this technique, however, is … Selection bias is another potential concern because …

Perhaps the most serious disadvantage of this method is that … In recent years, however, this approach has been challenged by … Non-government agencies are also very critical of the new policies. All the studies reviewed so far, however, suffer from the fact that … Critics of laboratory-based experiments contend that such studies … There are certain problems with the use of focus groups. One of these is that there is less …

Using evaluative adjectives to comment on research

Introducing general criticism.

Critics question the ability of poststructuralist theory to provide … Non-government agencies are also very critical of the new policies. Smith’s meta-analysis has been subjected to considerable criticism. The most important of these criticisms is that Smith failed to note that … The X theory has been vigorously challenged in recent years by a number of writers. These claims have been strongly contested in recent years by a number of writers. More recent arguments against X have been summarised by Smith and Jones (1982): Critics have also argued that not only do surveys provide an inaccurate measure of X, but the … Many analysts now argue that the strategy of X has not been successful. Jones (2003), for example, argues that …

Introducing the critical stance of particular writers

Smith (2014) disputes this account of … Jones (2003) has also questioned why … However, Jones (2015) points out that … The author challenges the widely held view that … Smith (1999) takes issue with the contention that … The idea that … was first challenged by Smith (1992). Smith is critical of the tendency to compartmentalise X. However, Smith (1967) questioned this hypothesis and …

Jones (2003) has challenged some of Smith’s conclusions, arguing that … Another major criticism of Smith’s study, made by Jones (2003), is that … Jones (2003) is probably the best-known critic of the X theory. He argues that … In her discussion of X, Smith further criticises the ways in which some authors … Smith’s decision to reject the classical explanation of X merits some discussion … In a recent article in Academic Journal, Smith (2014) questions the extent to which … The latter point has been devastatingly critiqued by Jones (2003), who argues that … A recently published article by Smith et al. (2011) casts doubt on Jones’ assumption that … Other authors (see Smith, 2012; Jones, 2014) question the usefulness of such an approach.

+44 (0) 161 306 6000

The University of Manchester Oxford Rd Manchester M13 9PL UK

Connect With Us

The University of Manchester

We’re celebrating the Best of Chicago at Lincoln Park Zoo! $20 Early bird tickets are on sale NOW!

Chicago Reader

Chicago’s alternative nonprofit newsroom

Manchester by the Sea is a study in grief, guilt, and responsibility

Share this:.

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

This review contains spoilers.

The three films written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan— You Can Count on Me (2000), Margaret (2011), and his latest, Manchester by the Sea —all deal with grief, guilt, responsibility, and connection. But Mancheste r, which already has garnered some serious awards buzz, is the most explicit in threading these ideas together. Its protagonist, a directionless janitor named Lee (Casey Affleck), is haunted by a tragedy in his recent past when he returns to the title Massachusetts town to bury his older brother and learns that he’s been named legal guardian of his 16-year-old nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Margaret may be the more lyrical film, and You Can Count on Me is more straightforward in its telling, but Manchester is the most daring of the three for the way Lonergan paints a fresh layer of grief over an existing one: the death of Lee’s brother (played in flashbacks by Kyle Chandler) from congenital heart failure comes as no surprise, but it proves doubly painful for Lee, compounding the tragedy in his past. Lonergan rejects the platitudes about grief offered by more formulaic films, opting instead for messy, open-ended journeys that trade in life’s mundanities and uncomfortable truths. Manchester by the Sea , like Lonergan’s previous films, suggests that the only meaning to be found in tragedy is the wisdom that it’s meaningless, that grief is not to be overcome, but to be borne.

Trauma shapes all of Lonergan’s protagonists, who grapple with the horror and injustice of life while reaching out to others, often unconsciously, to fill their emotional void. In You Can Count on Me , grown siblings Terry (Mark Ruffalo) and Sammy (Laura Linney) are bound by their parents’ death in a car crash years earlier, struggling to comprehend the role grief played in forming them. In Margaret , 17-year-old Lisa (Anna Paquin) attempts to deal responsibly with the role she played in a stranger’s accidental death and, in doing so, learns that adults can be as irresponsible as children. Lee also wrestles with guilt, grief, and responsibility—his three young children have died in a house fire caused by his carelessness—before realizing that he’ll never get over what happened. “People don’t want to move on from their feelings of loss, exactly,” Lonergan explained in a recent interview on National Public Radio. “You feel like you owe it to the people that you’ve lost to remember them, and to carry that pain around with you in some form.”

His characters may nurse their grief, but they try to process their guilt by punishing other people—and themselves. Terry commits petty crimes, Sammy sleeps with her married boss, Lisa seduces one of her teachers, and Lee, the most blighted of them all, drinks and fights. Lonergan’s characters ring true in the way they talk around their emotional issues, baiting others into an emotional response of their own or simply talking over them to drown out things they don’t want to hear. Lee chooses to surround himself with people, but whether he’ll appease or provoke them depends on whether he happens to be numb or overwhelmed by pain.

A playwright originally, Lonergan understands that people rarely say what they mean, especially if their feelings are raw, and both Lee and Patrick protect themselves with tough talk. This posturing keeps their feelings in check, and when this pretense fails, their encounters are more clumsy than cathartic. In a humorous scene, Patrick breaks down over a piece of meat in the freezer that reminds him of his father’s refrigerated corpse, and Lee kicks in Patrick’s bedroom door to offer awkward consolation. Later, Lee explains to Patrick in four simple words that his anguish precludes him from staying in Manchester: “I can’t beat it.” Though thankful for each other’s presence, Lee and Patrick would rather keep their emotions capped. Still, they seem to know—like Sammy and Terry in You Can Count on Me and Lisa and her mother in Margaret —that their connection, fortified through loss, is the one true constant in their lives.

By contrast, Lee’s unexpected connection with his ex-wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), drives him over the edge. Near the end of the film, they bump into each other on the street, standing over a stroller that holds Randi’s newborn child by another man. In a rush of overlapping dialogue, Randi unspools her grief, and Lee denies his own, clenching and coiling into himself. She tells him that they’ll never get over what happened, that their hearts will always be broken. By the end of Manchester by the Sea , Lee has accepted that his grief is too powerful to overcome. Instead of shedding their losses for some sugarcoated sense of peace, Lonergan’s protagonists learn how to carry them.  v

• Transfer Centre
• Live on Sky
• Get Sky Sports
• Kick It Out
• Black Lives Matter
• British South Asians in Football
• Work @ Sky Sports
• Terms & Conditions

Manchester United's board in agreement they should target Michael Olise this summer - Paper Talk

Plus: Erik ten Hag insists there is no chance of Manchester United selling Marcus Rashford; Arsenal are lining up two more big deals ahead of the summer transfer window following Ben White's contract renewal, but Aaron Ramsdale's time at the club looks to be coming to an end

Saturday 16 March 2024 07:16, UK

The top stories and transfer rumours from Saturday's newspapers...

DAILY EXPRESS

Manchester United's board are reportedly all in agreement that they should target Michael Olise this summer.

Tottenham midfielder Rodrigo Bentancur has praised Ange Postecoglou for being 'very attentive' during his recovery from recent injuries.

Arsenal are reportedly lining up two more big deals ahead of the summer transfer window following Ben White's contract renewal, but Aaron Ramsdale's time at the club looks to be coming to an end.

• Papers: Man Utd board agreed on transfer target Olise
• PL & FA Cup Predictions: Spurs to leave it late at Fulham
• Transfer Centre LIVE! Ange: CL spot wouldn't change Spurs plans
• Cheeky MVG finishes off Littler's nine-darter!
• Championship predictions: Cardiff to edge Swansea showdown?
• Man City to face Real in CL quarter-finals while Arsenal draw Bayern
• 'It's a playground for her' | Hayes hails 'maverick' James
• Rees-Zammit ready for NFL Pro Day: I can make this work
• Who can win the title? What's still to play for? Six Nations permutations
• 'One of worst days I've seen McIlroy play' | What went wrong on erratic round?
• Latest News

George Russell has hilariously exposed his Formula One rivals for desperately texting him and Toto Wolff about the vacant Mercedes seat for next season.

An academic has warned that Mike Tyson may be at risk of several health risks - including veins rupturing in the brain - as he prepares for his comeback bout against Jake Paul.

• Transfer Centre LIVE!

Stream Sky Sports on NOW

Download the Sky Sports App

Jeremie Frimpong, who was a target for Manchester United last summer, has more goal involvements than Bruno Fernandes this season despite playing at right wing-back for Bayer Leverkusen.

Erik ten Hag has insisted there is no chance of Manchester United selling Marcus Rashford.

Amir Khan has backed Wayne Rooney to fight Jamie Vardy and has even offered to train the Manchester United legend.

• Stream SkySports with NOW | Get Sky Sports
• Get Sky Sports with WhatsApp | Download the Sky Sports app

THE ATHLETIC

Real Madrid head coach Carlo Ancelotti says he expects to have Thibaut Courtois and Eder Militao available after the international break.

DAILY MIRROR

Lee Clark has declared that it's his "ultimate dream" to see Liverpool starlet Bobby play for Newcastle in the future.

Jurgen Klopp has confirmed that Curtis Jones should return to the Liverpool squad after the international break - with Diogo Jota and Trent Alexander-Arnold back in the fold soon after.

Virgil van Dijk is already one of the world's best defenders - but says LeBron James is inspiring him to be even better.

Ben White was reportedly involved in an 'angry exchange' with England assistant manager Steve Holland during the World Cup in Qatar.

Mercedes will use the Australian Grand Prix weekend to "experiment" with its W15 car to figure out how they can help Lewis Hamilton fight closer to the front.

Liverpool fans have been left delighted by teenager Jayden Danns' new contract signing.

The uncertainty over Erik ten Hag's future as Manchester United manager has left his coaching staff in limbo.

Real Madrid have reportedly 'caused a rift' between the club and their star winger Vinicius Jr, after the LaLiga giants posted a controversial photo of the Brazilian on their Instagram story.

Amanda Staveley has apologised to Steve Bruce after she claimed he did not want to work following Newcastle's controversial £305m Saudi-backed takeover in 2021.

DAILY RECORD

Barry Ferguson has accused Gareth Southgate of slapping Scottish football in the face by snubbing Jack Butland from England's latest squad.

SCOTTISH SUN

Ryan Hardie has been told not to give up on joining fellow Championship strikers Lyndon Dykes and Che Adams in Steve Clarke's Scotland squad.

Get Sky Sports on WhatsApp!

You can now start receiving messages and alerts for the latest breaking sports news, analysis, in-depth features and videos from our dedicated WhatsApp channel!

Find out more here .

Could you win £250,000 with Super 6 through the week? Play for free, entries by 7:45pm Tuesday.

How to watch Premier League, F1, EFL, WSL and more

• Stream with NOW

• Upgrade Now