A literary analysis is a form of an essay that students write in school. It evaluates and examines a piece of literature or an aspect of a particular literary piece. As such, it can include any big theme or idea of a book or literary subject under the sun.
Writing an Effective Literary Analysis Piece
Most professors will assign writing projects on specific books, especially in literature programs without a care of how you should go about it. Students, therefore, have to sort through and come up with relevant formats for the literary analysis assignment though most of them often consult unverified sources that impact their grades.
A paper on literary analysis should follow a specific format with a distinctive style of writing. It should entail the following steps. You need to know the aim of an essay on literary analysis, comprehend its format, properly plan, write, and edit the final product.
- Identify the aim of the literary analysis piece
An effective literary analysis aims at proving your evaluation and examination of a piece of literature. You have to break the literature piece into components before analyzing their features and subsequent contribution towards the whole. Assuming you read a specific book or novel, you must have a distinctive understanding, and for the sake of analysis, consider the subject, style, form, theme, the connection between content and form, the main and subplot, flaws, and strengths of characters besides the storyline. However, in many scenarios, you will only have to focus on an individual aspect of the literary piece.
You not only have to read the piece of literature exhaustively but also analyze it critically to come up with conclusions aimed at convincing the audience about your perspective of the literary piece.
- The components of an effective literary analysis
Most students make mistakes when they don’t know the components to include in a literary essay. It should include a specific subject that you mold in a way that can communicate the primary idea. The essay should also incorporate a thesis statement which informs the reader on what to anticipate from the whole paper. It should come out very clearly in conveying the essay’s primary point. Finally, the essay should contain an introduction, the body, and the conclusion.
- Starting the writing process
You have to begin the essay with an introduction where you capture your reader’s interest by focusing on your main point. It can entail an aspect of a poem or book you want to analyze. The end of your introduction should have the thesis statement to make your work easy when it comes to writing the body text of the essay. Ensure the thesis statement comes in one sentence for more clarity.
The end of the introduction ushers in the body text where you should at least write three paragraphs with a minimum of five hundred to seven hundred words. It can also help if you included a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph within the body text.
- Ending the Essay Piece
You naturally have to end the essay with a convincing and strong conclusion. Summarize the whole work and restate the primary points and thesis statement. You should also remember to avoid introducing new concepts at this stage.
Conclusion
It proves a bit complicated when it comes to writing an essay based on literary analysis. Understanding how to write one can, however, make you join the elite group of literary critics who comprehend the intention and elements of an author’s writing.