How To Write A Literary Analysis Essay?

Introduction

The word “analysis” means to interpret or analyze things. But when it comes along with “Literature,” it moves a step forward towards analyzing the literature (the literature is anything that is in written form). So, literary analysis meaning is to examine and evaluate the work of the author and understanding each and every detail and symbolic signs of the writer's thought. Putting a word forward, it is the deeper study of the author’s views, interpreting the text from different angles, and finding the reasons for some certain points that why the writer made them in that way.  

So, the Literary analysis Essay writing in academics is the next opportunity provided to you by your professor or institution to learn the literary analysis or how to analyze the confronting literature. It is basically an assignment that may be assigned to you regarding any topic, or you can also do such analysis for yourself if you are fond of doing it. Literary analysis can be done for any piece of literature involving poems, short stories, plays, novels, and drama, etc.  

Different analysis for distinct pieces of literature

For a different piece of literature, you will do your analysis differently. For example, in the case of a poem, you would relate the different imagery items with the form and content of it. If you go to analyze the play or any other novel, then you must comprehend the essence of the author’s dialogues and the fine details of the characters used along with their expressions described. While dealing with short stories or any other such type of literature, you must absorb the main communicating things or the flaws made by the author in their characters.  

The next step to comprehending the literature is to interpret the elements of your evaluated writing into basic components and then drawing your own statement on their basis. Your own statement is what you understand at your mental level from the writing you read or studied. The best analysis of any literature is based on how you catch those moments of the writer’s life in which he was feeling and writing his piece of art. In other words, how do you understand the author’s way or idea of writing his piece of literature?

Literary analysis, apart from your assignment work

So far, we’ve come to understand the analysis meaning from the literature perspective. There’s something more very common in the world of critics and philosophers. We know that it is the assignment work assigned to most of the students in their academic careers by their professors. And the students also conceive it mostly as a burden or responsibility rather than learning it while making fun.  

It’s the proven hypothesis that when a person is adopted to do a job while being stressed, he/she can’t do it up to the mark. So, for better analysis and excellent work in case of your assignment, you must do and study the literature analysis with full ease, comfort, and relaxation. But never forget to be responsible and authentic in your assignment writings as your grades are concerned with them.

Moving a single step more

The thing that I want to elaborate on is that the subtopic of this section block reflects that “literature analysis; apart from the assignment work.” If you put it in another context of it, then it means that beyond your assigned work, you can also do the literature analysis for your own need, e.g., by the critics or philosophers.  

The critics and philosophers, after reading the other author’s writing, analyze their written texts for their own comprehension. Sometimes they also write their reviews in case of that, but we are not concerned about it.  

So, the literary analysis essay is very important either from the academic or self-writing point of view. It is all about simplifying the author’s ideas and terms along with your own thesis statement, making the writing simple and understandable for your targeted audience.

So, the concern of this blog is to guide you all people about writing your Literary analysis Essay assignment with the major key elements and basic steps. That is about turning your essay into impressive writing, appealing the eyes of the readers, or specifically your professor. The blog will also contain the description of some usable terms in your essay that can enhance the Essay Quality.  

Key-Elements to consider while writing the essay

Answer the basic questions to reach your thesis statement

Before writing the essay, the thing you must be careful about is the reading and interpretation. While reading any text, you must comprehend it from every angle. Why feeling worried? We will assist you in understanding what questions you should answer while reading the text. Deliberately, these questions would lighten your skills and polish your thoughts to shape your main claim. These include:

1. What is the main insight of the author that he intended to deliver through his writings?
2. What are the literary devices depicting in the text with collaboration to the author’s thought?
3. In what context the author is using the symbolic terms and literary devices?
4. What did the author want to make his readers learn from the writing?
5. Creating a full imaginary film while reading and standing the characters with all the belongings of expressions on their places and asking what they wanted to convey or how they reacted? In this question, consider the surroundings, environment, the plot or theme, and all the necessities that are must.

Asking the answers to these questions from yourself will be helpful to you in making a driven-thesis and understanding the writer’s insight.  

Importance of Essay’s outline

Drawing the outline for your essay is very important, and it is the work to be done while reading and comprehending the focused writing. You can draw your essay outline after the thorough reading of the text. You can also do it during the reading session by noting the important points on your notebook and making a flow chart ending at the main thesis statement.  

The standard way of designing an effective outline for your essay is that you follow the primitive way of doing it as:

• Brief Introduction

Start with a brief introduction having your main thesis statement  

• Body paragraphs

Create your essay’s body paragraphs with the topic sentences pointing towards and summarizing the main claim of your essay. In these paragraphs, you usually argue your main theme with different aspects and proving evidence.  

• The conclusion

And then giving the conclusion of the essay is a very brief and descriptive form, summing up all the aspects of the essay into a single pretty block. 

Advantages of Forming an outline structure

Many of the essay writers, experts, or professionals say that designing an outline can be the most delicate phase of writing and formatting an essay assignment. As a body can’t stand without a backbone similarly, the foundation of a good quality analysis essay lies in the outline structure of the essay. You can say that the outline designing is the foremost step of your analysis essay writing and also the most important one. As outline designing acts as the backbone strength of your analysis essay.  

• The main advantage of designing the outline structure is that it keeps you focused and uni-directional while your essay writing and not let you be astray from the way of losing the quality of your essay.
• Summing up in 4 words that “it keeps you well-focused.”

Varied types of literary Analysis

Analyzing a text doesn’t mean to be in a single way. Rather a text or writing can be analyzed from different angles giving rise to different types such analysis. These types don’t mainly differ from larger aspects, but there exist some minor detailed variations among them. Before starting the main structure and writing of your analysis essay, let yourself understand the types of analysis. These types include:

1. Close reading

This type of analysis reading is mainly done for the novels, short stories, or such type of literature piece involving the dialogues and the characters in a scene. In such type of analysis reading, you have to pay very closer and deeper attention to the characters that were described by the author in a scene. Sometimes, you may have to extend your heed territories up to the expressions and gestures of the characters and also considering their reactions to any action. In this case, you must understand why the author has used certain types of strong literary devices with more enriched insight.  

2. Theoretical reading

This type of analysis reading is to interpret a certain theory in the scientific literature. It is mainly used to express and efficiently learn a specific theory. It may also include the comparison and contrast of two different theories. The analyzer has to relate the authors writing to different theories and coming up with the idea common to the author’s thought supported by his self-explained evidence.  

3. Comparative reading

The word comparison includes both sides of the picture; the similarities and the differences. This type of analytic reading involves the comparison of the text from different points of view. It may include finding the similarities between specific points of literature or understanding the differences in the sense of developing the connections between the links given in the author’s writing art and proving your own thesis statement. The main objective of this type is to give a strong conclusion, along with the discerned thesis statement.  

4. Contextual analysis reading

It is meant to analyze the context of the literature deeply or finding the supporting historical evidence for your essay. This type of analysis requires a lot of more research other than a single reading of the literature. In case of any essay, your thesis statement is that point which is heavily focused or debated. The additional research that is required in this analysis writing is meant to give plus support to your thesis claim with the strong historical framework. The essence of this writing lies in the fact of how the context is correlated to the writing.    

5. Applied reading analysis

It involves some steps back to the other types of analysis reading, or you can say it is less formal than the other types. The difference of this analysis reading from others is that it involves relating the context or the mainly discerned points of the literature to your own personal experience and points of view. Furthermore, it refers more to your own experiences rather than a researched one.  

Important Basic steps for your Analysis Essay writing

I hope you’ve understood the delicate points and inferences you must consider while writing an essay. The outline designing, interpreting the author’s ideas and thoughts, and comprehending the analysis reading types are some pre-requisites to be done before starting your essay. It is similar to getting your ingredients ready before cooking the chicken.  

Now, we are moving towards understanding that how to write the literary analysis essay on the edge. There will be some important steps that you must study and understand carefully before doing the essay writing yourself. These steps include:

1. Interpreting and reading the text while recognizing the literary devices, narrative stances and the structure
2. Creating your thesis statement
3. Extracting textual evidence (types of textual evidence)
4. Deciding the title
5. Writing the essay introduction
6. Creating Body paragraphs (use of textual evidence)
7. Wrapping up into conclusion
8. Revising and reshaping

1. Interpretation of the text

The interpretation of the text is made first, and the use of specific literary devices is considered. You, as a reader, must extract and identify the parts of the literature as the language choice, narrative sentences and structure. At this step, you must absorb and separate the things used in the text, such as:

1. Understanding the literary devices that which type of phrases or words has the writer used in the text to give the text a strong and penetrating feel
2. Understanding the language choice that what type of language the author has been using, either it is the simple descriptive language or the figurative language that primarily includes the metaphors and the simile?
3. Answer the narrative sentences like who is telling the story, and what is the way of telling it?
4. Also, continue with considering the tone of the text that what type of impact it leaves. Whether it is a funny story or a tragic one?
5. Understanding the structure of the text to which part of the literature it belongs? Is it a poem, novel, or a play?

2. Creating your thesis statement

The creation of a thesis statement is the most considerable step in the analysis essay writing. As the worth of this point has already been mentioned in this blog earlier, but there are some other more important points that you must know.  

• Your thesis statement reflects the whole theme of your essay, or it is the filtered idea that will be the soul of all sub-themes or supporting body paragraphs.
• So you must be very careful about developing your thesis statement as your whole essay revolves around it all the time you debate or present it.
• The context of your thesis statement must be arguable or authentic. Keep in mind that the most impressive thesis statement is that which is the most debated and supported one.

3. Extracting textual evidence

Textual evidence is the evidence that you use to support your thesis statement from the same writing you analyzed, but you don’t go for the true to type text from the literature. You may use some key points, some rewritten examples, or the arguments and the summary or direct quotations.

Types of textual evidence

Depending upon these, there are a few common types of textual that you can use in your literary essay while supporting your main claim. These are:

A) Summary

In some evidence, you may need a brief summary from the original writing, but be sure that you use the relevance in relating that brief summary to your main thesis claim.  

B) Paraphrase

In this type, you see the exact lines of the author’s writing, but don’t write these lines in an exactly similar way but rephrase them. Paraphrase means rewriting someone’s words into your own words. You can also use such paraphrase evidence in your analysis essay.  

C) Use of direct quotations

A justified use of direct quotations makes your analysis writing more persuasive and vivid. These quotations usually add clarity and authenticity to your developing ideas and body paragraphs, having the topic sentences.    

Be independent and confident while using the textual evidence, but the one thing you have to make sure is that clear the relevance of the textual evidence with the context of your main claim.  

4. Deciding the title

The title is just not merely a name to a writing, but It covers the whole content and essence of the essay. You must keep your title as concise and focused as possible. It usually involves the name of the author and the analyzed text.  

As the title is the first text that is eye-contacted with the reader, so it must be impressive and well-communicating.

5. Writing the essay introduction

The introduction, in the case of the analysis essay, involves the author’s name along with the title and the main thesis claim. The introduction covers the overall theme of the essay. It primarily involves the most important thing, the main theme, along with the scope of the essay.  

Scope is something additional that some of the writers use, but not all. It usually confines the direction of your essay that the essay will describe this specific point and not the other one. The way of writing an introduction is to first write the orientation and then tailoring the orientation towards the main theme.

The main theme or central idea and the scope of the essay come at the end of the essay.  

6. Creating Body paragraphs

In body paragraphs, you support and explain each virtual evidence in a separate and defined paragraph. Each paragraph in case of body paragraphs, has the topic sentence that you have to prove in that corresponding paragraph with valid evidence and arguments. The topic sentences of the whole essay’s paragraphs somehow contribute to the central idea of your analysis essay.

As we discussed in the previous points about the textual evidence, so these body paragraphs are the best places for using these textual evidences demonstrating the focus of your essay. The usage of linking words in case of topic sentences within these body paragraphs can be the impressive transitions or turnovers.  

7. Wrapping up into conclusion

After writing the whole essay, you have to conclude your essay or wrapping up all the pretty components of the essay into a single explicit paragraph at the end. The conclusion is almost the same as that of the introduction, restating the main theme and summary of all supporting evidence. The conclusion paragraph usually starts from words like, in a nutshell, summing up or in the light of the above discussion.  

8. Revise and Re-shaping the essay

The next or the last phase of writing your analysis essay is to reread or revise your essay for one, two, or more times, assuring the quality and improving the structure or the usage of the main or sub-main points. If it is required, then reshape it, making your essay final in a placating way.

Final word

So, it can be concluded that a literary analysis essay is a very important way of analyzing and presenting your thoughts and extractions in a great way. This blog on the topic of how to write a literary analysis essay was meant to deliver the most understandable and informative stuff about analysis essay writing. So, for any person seeking for guidance and assistance in writing an analysis essay, this blog will be the front-line equipment with the description of many key points and 8 basic steps starting from the scratch and coming up to the conclusion.