Literary Analysis Essay Writing: Tips And Examples
A literature analysis essay is a great opportunity for you to talk about the book you liked or disliked. Following the literary essay format, you will be able to analyze the author’s intentions, the characters and settings in the book, its idea, and many more things. However, there’s much to do to have enough data and knowledge to compose a successful paper.
How to Write a Literary Essay?
- Write a powerful thesis statement.
- Write an observation.
- Write examples to prove your thesis statement.
- Insert your research results.
- Don’t make your intro too big.
- Build the main body right.
- Correlate your conclusion to the introduction.
Remember, it’s not a question or observation, it’s a professionally composed statement analyzing the text and suggesting the further development of the paper.
This is a part with your main thoughts on the book, in brief. Write what you have seen there: vivid characters, frequent flashbacks, etc. You can write something that people may not notice at first: certain symbols or historical connections.
It’s usually three examples, usually proved with a couple of quotations from the book. Make sure you don’t write too much, as the work shouldn’t be large.
If you’ve done any research on the author or the book, consider including the results into the paper to strengthen it and prove your connection suggestions.
It’s a relatively short work, so don’t use too much information in the introduction. Put your thesis statement to the very end of it to make it stressed.
Insert a transition from the introduction: a sentence to strengthen your thesis statement. Then show examples (quotations from the book), and then write about your own analysis, research, etc.
Make sure they bring the same idea: start it with a reshaped version of your thesis statement, then go to something more general. If the intro goes from general to specific, the conclusion has to go in a reverse direction.
Things to do Beforehand
- Read the book attentively.
- Ask the questions you may need to answer.
- Look for connections.
- Do some research about the author.
- Collect bibliographic data on the book.
- Outline the literary analysis.
Examples: what did the author mean by the main idea of the book? What’s the development of the characters in it means? What is the overall theme? What are the signs and symbols in the book?
Examples: connection between characters and the main theme; the theme and the symbols.
Conclusion
Writing a literary analysis is difficult, as you need to include so many things there. Make sure you read the book you analyze attentively and outline the paper well. Make your thesis statement powerful and do everything to prove it to the readers. If you do all this, you will compose a highly successful analysis paper on any book.