How To Write A Literary Analysis Essay

Several types of assignments primarily cause confusion among students, and literary essays are one of them. Writing such essays can require a deep understanding of a concept and a set of specific skills, so they can frequently become challenging. Some college students don’t know how to handle a literary essay and, therefore, don’t like it. 

 

But fear not; with our complete guide, you will be able to handle literary analysis essays like a seasoned pro and impress your professor with top-notch papers. All it takes to succeed is to follow the steps in our article step by step and invest diligence, perseverance, and time in your writing.

What Is a Literary Analysis Essay?

An essay that seeks to analyze and interpret a piece of literature by focusing on its story, characters, themes, and symbols is known as a literary analysis essay. Such a paper goes beyond just summarizing the text; it analyzes the literary devices used, the author’s objectives, and the text’s more profound implications.

The writer must conduct an in-depth analysis to reveal the work’s hidden meanings. Such papers usually aim to inspire readers to value the intricacy and creativity of narrative writing. 

How to Write an Essay About a Book: What Is the Purpose of a Literary Essay?

Literary analysis essays dissect the work from every angle to find deeper meaning in a piece of literature than what meets the eye. This essay sheds light on the author’s intentions by critically analyzing the text’s themes, characters, settings, and literary devices. Literary analysis illuminates the challenges of language and storytelling, helping students to develop analytical and critical thinking abilities. 

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay: Seven Steps to Success

To write a quality literary essay, you must set aside a significant amount of time because it always requires studying the literary piece, thorough research, and decent writing skills. So, how to write a literary essay? It always starts with some reading! 

Step One: Carefully Read the Text Multiple Times

Remember that you are writing about a book or novel when dealing with literary essays. This fact is important enough to be mentioned in the essay type’s title! Hence, the obvious first step to start preparation for writing is reading. Depending on the type of assignment, you will either have to choose an essay topic yourself or use one assigned by the professor. 

So, the first step is to read the material thoroughly and make notes. If you want to do an excellent job of analyzing what you read, pay attention to what strikes you as interesting, surprising, or even confusing.

In literary analysis, your aim isn’t just to recount the story’s events; it’s to penetrate the writing and feel the text’s structure and its actual meaning. Literary devices (parts of text used to express meaning and produce effects) are what you should be looking for most of all. Looking for links between texts is another strategy when analyzing and contrasting numerous texts.

You might begin your analysis by concentrating on a few critical topics. Keep in mind the connection of the text’s elements as you examine them. Notes or highlights might help you remember key sections and quotes. 

If you feel like you struggle to conduct proper notes, it would be best to answer the following set of questions: 

• What impressed you? Have you thought about a specific scene, sentence, or image for quite some time? If it captivated you, you can likely use it as a basis for an interesting argument. 
• Did anything perplex you? Perhaps the unexpected behavior of a character caught you off guard, or maybe the book’s climax left you bewildered. A literary work with a confusing moment is like a garment with a loose thread: if you pull on it, the whole thing unravels. To gain valuable insights about the work overall, ask yourself why the author chose to write about that character or situation in that particular way. 
• Were any patterns apparent to you? Is there a word or picture the main character uses that keeps popping up in the novel? You will have nearly all of your essay planned out if you can identify the pattern, determine its relevance, and how it runs across the text. 
• Did you notice any contradictions? Literary essays of the highest quality acknowledge and explain the complexity inherent in great literary works. The foundation of a stellar essay is in the ability to deconstruct a literary piece. 

A proper answer to each of these questions can become an excellent foundation for your future literary analysis essay. We recommend choosing one central statement and several related critical arguments. While taking notes, you can plan your arguments’ structure and uniform distribution among the paper’s chapters.

Step Two: Develop the Thesis 

After you have settled on a question to answer, it’s time to start searching the book for relevant information. As long as you keep gathering information and ideas and allow them to simmer, it’s okay if you have yet to figure out what you want to say. Write down any references to your theme, whether passages, symbols, images, or scenes. You will begin to see patterns in these instances at some point, and your thesis will start to take shape. 

To develop a solid thesis you should gather the evidence. We recommend remembering the basic elements of the story to bolster your analysis: 

• Plot. Every single thing that happens in the book.
• Characters. The people who act in a literary piece. The protagonist is the central figure in a story.
• Conflict. The primary tension of the work. Typically, the protagonist is driven to achieve a goal while being obstructed by forces that work against them, known as antagonists.
• Setting. A story’s setting can be described by location, historical period, weather, social climate, and economic circumstances.
• Narrator. Whoever is narrating the tale. The narrator’s role can range from providing an objective account of events to expressing the views and thoughts of a character or characters.
• Themes. Themes are the work’s core concepts or messages, typically abstract concepts about individuals, society, or life in general. A theme could be conflicting or even antagonistic.

It is time to create the thesis statement when you have reviewed the data and decided how you will answer the questions. An argumentative thesis states an assertion regarding a piece of literature and must be backed up by proof and reasoning. Literary essays revolve around a thesis statement, and most of the paper should be devoted to proving this point.

Step Three: Develop Your Arguments 

The body paragraphs of your essay will lay out the arguments and evidence that support your thesis. You may find yourself juggling steps since you will need a clearer idea of organizing your argument before you can draft your thesis statement.

There is no universally applicable strategy. For example, you could be asked to analyze and contrast two characters in a particular piece of literature or follow a specific image. Different kinds of argumentation are necessary for answering these questions. Read more to learn about constructing arguments for versatile essay types! 

• Compare and contrast. There is a significant chance you’ve encountered this type of essay before, so there is nothing new here. Your argument structure in a literary analysis will be identical to any other compare-and-contrast essay. Both subject-by-subject and point-by-point approaches are absolutely acceptable. You could combine the two methods; for instance, you could spend a paragraph outlining the main character’s characteristics in general, then compare and contrast them in a couple of paragraphs. 
• Trace. It seems simple, doesn’t it? Spoiler: it doesn’t. Your instructor isn’t looking for a list of examples. The difference between summarizing and analyzing is that the person reading your work wants you to draw connections between the scenes. To make your examples more organized, sort them into categories and classes. Last but not least, remember the big picture at all times. Once you’ve selected and examined your samples, you should better grasp the work and how the image, symbol, or phrase you choose contributed to developing the work’s main themes and stylistic methods.
• Debate. This essay asks you to argue for or against a particular point of view on the work’s aesthetics, ethics, or morality. Some questions may ask you to evaluate the work as a whole, while others may focus on specific people or groups. First, you should know that your arguments should not be based only on your emotions. Read the text carefully and look for proof; every literary essay requires this. Second, remember that the most compelling literary essays present unexpected and contradictory views. Make an effort to be creative. 

Step Four: Write Title and Introduction

How do you start writing your literary analysis essay? It’s obvious: always start from the title! At this point, you are probably done making notes and reading books, so it is finally time to actually start writing (wow!). 

Title 

Make sure the title of your analysis explains what it will be about. Typically, it will include the author’s name and the text(s) you are evaluating. Be as brief and exciting as you can be. Rest assured that coming up with a solid title will become second nature after you start writing the essay and have a better grasp of your ideas. So, don’t stress if you find this task challenging at first.

Introduction

A brief synopsis of your argument is given in the essay’s introduction. You should summarize the essay’s structure and include the thesis statement; a standard introduction introduces the work and author before moving on. You might highlight a specific device you want to emphasize, or another option is to suggest a commonly accepted view of the book and show how your thesis will disprove it. After that, you can wrap up the intro by providing a sneak peek at the main chapters.

Below you will find some general tips to make your introduction more convincing and catching for readers. 

1. Provide the context. The purpose of an introduction is to set the stage and inform the reader of what is to come. Which book are you talking about? Which characters? Do you have a particular subject in mind? 
2. Present your thesis. You can expect to see the thesis towards the conclusion of your introduction. 
3. Answer the reader’s questions. Just how significant is this subject, and what makes your stance on it unique? An effective opening will hook the reader by implying that your argument is unexpected or goes against common sense.  
4. Announce the following essay. After reading the introduction, the reader should have a solid idea of the essay’s scope and the steps you’ll take to prove your thesis. You shouldn’t detail every single step, but you should give some indication of the structure you intend to use. 

Step Five: Write Body Chapters 

After you’ve penned the introduction, it’s time to turn your arguments into body paragraphs. Your argumentation will dictate the organization of your essay’s body paragraphs, but regardless of your choice, they must accomplish the following: 

• Make good use of transitions. Paragraphs in a literary essay should be well-connected to one another and the subject matter. Imagine that every paragraph is a reaction to the one before it. Use transitional words and phrases like similarly, on the contrary, therefore, and additionally to signal the type of response you’re offering. 
• Construct a central idea to its fullest extent. Stay on topic and avoid wordiness in your paragraph. The body paragraphs are like bricks; if any of them are weak, the whole building would fall. 
• Use a powerful topic sentence to start. Similar to highway signs, topic sentences direct the reader to the current and future locations of the text. In addition to introducing the reader to the topic of the next paragraph, a strong topic sentence should provide them with an idea of the following arguments. 

Step Six: Write Your Essay’s Conclusion

Just as you introduced the issue and stated your thesis in the introduction, you will need to reinstate the main points in the conclusion. An excellent conclusion should: 

• Move from the specific to the general. Your essay has probably focused on a tiny portion of the novel or poem, such as a single character or a chapter. It would be smart to demonstrate how this topic affects the larger body of work.
• Not overwhelm the reader. You shouldn’t use the conclusion to stuff your essay with all the great ideas you had during brainstorming sessions but couldn’t fit into the main body of your essay. Instead, your conclusion should offer fresh paths of thought. 

Proofreading and Editing: How to Write a Literary Analysis

The last stage of writing a literary essay is proofreading. We’ve noticed a dramatic trend in modern education: many students tend to ignore the editing stage and often don’t allocate enough time to this process. This drastic mistake usually leads to poor grades and overwhelming frustration for students. 

Seasoned academic writers understand that editing is the most significant stage in the whole writing process. You should dedicate enough time and use different methods to guarantee the impeccable quality of your final drafts. Let’s focus on the versatility of effective proofreading methods: combining some of these approaches would allow you to find the most typical errors, including typos, grammar mistakes, and flaws in the paper’s logic or structure. 

The first step of the revision process is rereading. You should reread your literary analyses several times; the best solution would be to make breaks between iterations. There is one helpful hack that can make your revision more effective! Consider dedicating some rereadings to finding specific mistakes; such an approach can boost your attention by focusing on one particular issue. 

During the thorough revision, your best assistants are writing tools. Even the best academic writers are not ideal and need help perfecting their revision process. It would be smart to use apps like AHelp Spell Checker or Grammarly to spot errors and typos you’ve missed during manual checking. Both apps use color-coded suggestions, so you will be able to access each recommendation independently and decide if it is worth your attention or not. 

If you are not sure which word to use, check your text with our tool

The last step of your perfect revision is finding a beta reader. In the ideal world, your better reader should be an experienced academic writer or professional editor, but such perfection is not always possible. In any case, it is always better to have an alternative point of view, and even a revision from a friend or relative without any academic experience could make a difference. 

The Bottom Line

Writing a literary analysis may seem challenging at first glance, but you can complete this assignment quickly with the correct approach and perseverance. You need several things to succeed: a complete understanding of the assignment type and the writing process (you already have these with advice from our guide) and enough time for writing and editing. So, stop hesitating and start working on your assignment!

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