How to Write Literary Analysis Essay
Even if you are not an English and Literature major, there is a good chance that you’ll need to write more than one literary analysis in your academic career. Professors love assigning it to test the students’ ability to not just read the material, but also deeply understand and analyze it.
Unfortunately, many students experience troubles when literary analysis writing. Some simply don’t have the time to study a huge body of work that needs to be analyzed, while others are busy with other important assignments. Whatever your reasons for seeking help are, you have come to the right place: our expert writers will create a structured literary analysis essay for you from scratch exactly when you need it!
What Is Literary Analysis?
If you look at an example, you will see that the student’s job is to offer a deep analysis and evaluation of a literary work. The primary goal of this paper is to identify the message behind the work. To perform it you will need to break the entirety of the author’s work into smaller elements and analyze each of them individually before composing them back into a bigger picture.
A literary Analysis Definition
The official definition of literary analysis refers to the process of closely researching individual parts of a literary work in an attempt to see how they influence the work as a whole. The focus of the work may differ based on the type of work that is being evaluated. For example, analysis of a poem will rely heavily on the imagery, while the analysis of a play requires you to analyze the characters and the plot details.
Types of Literary Theory
In the current literary theory, there are several types of analysis widely used by scholars. There are no dramatic differences between each of them, but, in order to paint a complete picture with your writing, you will need to stick to one of these theories.
Close Reading
To perform this type of analysis, you will need to pay maximum attention even to the smallest details of the literary work and then connect them to the author’s message.
Theoretical Literature
With this type of literary analysis essay, the writer is asked to choose one or several theories and see how they can be applied to the original author’s work.
Comparative And Synergistic
For a comparative literary essay assignment, your job is to analyze and compare two or more fragments or aspects of the work, or even two works by the same author to find similarities between them.
Historical and Cultural Context
To evaluate the context of the creation of the author’s work, you will need to deeply research the historical and societal situation that made an impact on the piece of writing.
Applied Analysis
With an applied analysis, you need to take a less formal approach. Your primary goal is to describe how a particular piece of writing resonates with your own experiences and opinions.
Outline Structure of Literary Analysis Essay
Creating a literary analysis outline helps you plan your writing and always know which part comes next. Your essay will contain the following parts:
- Introduction, which needs a strong opening sentence, or a hook, and a thesis statement, where you express the main idea of your essay that you will later attempt to prove.
- Body paragraphs, where each paragraph refers to a specific point. The typical structure of a body paragraph includes a topic sentence, supporting evidence, commentary on how the evidence supports your opinion, and a brief concluding sentence.
- Conclusion, which serves as a way for you to reinstate your points, decide whether the author was successful in conveying their message, and evaluate the significance of the literary work.
Writing a Literary Analysis Essay
Follow these steps to write a strong paper.
- Focusing your topic
The topic of your essay needs to be narrow enough to fit in the limited space of the analysis paper.
- Evidence collection
Gather as much relevant information from credible sources about the work, the author, and the circumstances of the writing as possible.
- Creating outlines
Design an outline for your essay and stick to it, so that you don’t venture off-topic.
- Write a successful thesis statement
The thesis statement will influence the whole work, so make sure it’s absolutely relevant to your arguments and views.
- Revision in the Writing Process
Once you finish writing your paper, set it aside for a few days, then go back to it and read it carefully, editing and correcting any mistakes as you go.
Samples
A sample analysis essay high school can be very helpful if it’s your first time writing this assignment or you are not sure about some of its details. Check out the example written by one of our top writers and click here for order literary papers that will land you the best grade.
