literature essay writing

literature essay writing

Effective Strategies for Writing Literature Essays

1. Introduction

The course of writing a literature essay is a time-consuming process that contains some steps and stages. For example, finding materials and the necessary research is crucial, and the student should not ignore it. Then, there is the actual writing: choosing the right form for the theme, structuring, and deliberating. Moreover, before the final stage of presenting, the student should not forget to revise the draft and improve his piece of writing. Writing literature essays aims to evaluate students’ literary appreciation. Therefore, the structure and organization are essential. It can be done in several ways providing the student’s preferences. Most students start writing their literature essays in a concise analysis, moving on to close readings and ending up with linear progress analyses. The linear progress analysis is only one way to organize papers about literature. Analyzing a novel, students tend to follow the plot: introduction, problem, way to solution, and solution. However, literature essays do not permit the linear approach.

One of the most demanding types of assignments is writing a literature essay. It’s not only about summarizing the plot and debating characters or background authors. It’s about evaluating and discussing how the different aspects reveal deeper meanings or connotations. The analysis has to be written in a clear way, maintaining the same brainy impression. It’s a curse to indicate, and all students facing literature essays think they need experienced academic writing help to address such assignments. A professor will consider it a deficiency of your time administration, as he needs more from you than pointing out the current scene’s actors moving on the stage.

2. Analyzing the Text

In his essay, Oswald uses various terms like eggs, murderer, winter, cars to talk about possible and/or real “bumps” that they may experience in life. In the text, there is contrast between a road with large cars comparing these to good things that life can provide; and what he can actually eat, represented by a cracked egg. For the author, life is a set of “bumps” that, no matter how much it prepares, can suffer. Since childhood we are educated in the culture of success, to pursue our goals, not ending up waiting for things to happen. In most cases, we are raised for us to compete even within our family. This environment makes one think: “My neighbor has achieved such a thing, and I have not, I am having a bad education, which means that my parents did not succeed as well.” And then everyone is having a bad education.

E. Analyzing text: In the last step, you use the written work to construct an opinion on what it is about. It’s not just about saying the essay is good or bad; it’s about understanding what the critic used in his or her writing to obtain the result. When you analyze the text, you have to give voice to the author’s thoughts to understand why he/she has used his/her work, because in an essay you are going to analyze a work of another person from your perspective. Therefore, if you do not understand what this person has tried to do or say, it is almost impossible to talk about this person’s resources. The main point about analyzing the text is: “It doesn’t matter what the author did, but how he did it”; that is, identifying figures of speech, expressions, wordplay, quotes, etc.

3. Developing a Thesis Statement

There are usually two ways to develop a thesis statement. The first way may seem easier at first: you formulate a statement then spend some time and effort trying to prove it. The second way may seem more difficult at first: you formulate your statement by brainstorming and looking at the ideas you have come up with. The first way may take a little bit less effort at first, but it will make developing your essay difficult. The statement came before the evidence, so you are not really doing any real thinking during your research. The lack of actual thought will show up in your own writing, so your professor will instantly see that this thesis does not work. The second way may take a little bit more effort at first, but the extra time and effort spent out front will make the actual writing process much more rewarding and somewhat easier.

A thesis statement in an essay is like a tour guide in a museum: it tells the reader where everything is and why everything is where it is. Your thesis can help you make that suggestion by guiding you as you write your entire essay. It gives you advice on how to organize your points throughout the body of the essay. Indeed, once you understand what your thesis is, and how you want to develop it, your reasons for developing each point in your essay will become clearer. After that, it will be a lot easier to find effective support for every single one of your points.

4. Supporting Your Argument

Suppose your essay is about Huck Finn: If you say you would like to discuss the moral struggles in the book and that you believe he and Jim are moral equals, I am convinced that you are familiar with the book. Should you begin discussing the character of Jim, you can rely on the text as support for your argument. In other words, you can refer back to the work and share your conclusions, objections of support and faith.

English teachers often like you to refer back to the text in order to make your point. In essay-writing, this is called looking at the text for support. To both remain focused on your subject and are sure that your argument is persuasive, you need to refer to the assigned reading. If the object of your discussion is a character in A Farewell to Arms, an antebellum plantation in The Queen of Palmyra, or an invisible man in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, showing evidence of your thought process in creating your argument from the novel or short story can lead to an interesting discussion.

Providing support for your argument is a necessary and important part of creating a solid literature essay. Whether you are discussing a protagonist’s rise to power in The Queen of Palmyra or the significance of the scarlet letter in The Scarlet Letter, you need to include evidence that supports your argument. Often, literature essays need at least one quotation from the literary work to make your point convincing. Without support, your opinion is not valid. By providing support for your argument, you can also show that you are familiar with the literary work.

5. Conclusion

References to texts from mothers and mothering and to gender roles also formed an important discourse in all texts. There was a large amount of perceiving the mother as evil, the mother-child relationship as traumatic, and the father as a saviour. More specifically, the traditional view of mothers, and if mothers had other roles than that of mothering, appeared to be according to stereotypical norm or as deviant behaviour. In addition to this, no matter what kind of expectations the daughters might have for their future, they all saw themselves either as completely unprepared or a little prepared for mothering. This last question is especially important because it also suggests that the dominating discourse of mothering and femininity, as well as the stereotypical roles that mothers play in mother-daughter relationships, make it harder for daughters to imagine the kind of mother they want to be.

In the final analysis, students and teachers are always in a somewhat ad hoc situation when a literature essay is to be written, because an essay is dependent on the relationship between the reader and a text — and on the reader’s ideas about this text. Nevertheless, the five recommendations presented here will hopefully simplify some of the work related to the writing of essays. Namely, the recommendations make it easier for the teacher to discuss the essay with each student in a more detailed and focused way. They also make the students aware of several strategies for scrutinizing the object of the essay, and for verifying the theses. A good literature essay has the capacity to fascinate and involve both the reader and the writer, but this is a goal that can only be reached if the student is really given the opportunity to work within an ongoing dialogue, to take part in discussions concerned with the point and goals of his or her actual text, and to make use of an appropriate terminology rooted within the subject tradition. Of course, the literature essay is able to prove this fact, and this is the text that is eventually going to be evaluated.