what is literary composition essay

Definition of Essay

Essay is derived from the French word essayer , which means “ to attempt ,” or “ to try .” An essay is a short form of literary composition based on a single subject matter, and often gives the personal opinion of the author. A famous English essayist, Aldous Huxley defines essays as, “a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. ” The Oxford Dictionary describes it as “ a short piece of writing on a particular subject. ” In simple words, we can define it as a scholarly work in writing that provides the author’s personal argument .

• Types of Essay

There are two forms of essay: literary and non-literary. Literary essays are of four types:

• Expository Essay – In an expository essay , the writer gives an explanation of an idea, theme , or issue to the audience by giving his personal opinions. This essay is presented through examples, definitions, comparisons, and contrast .
• Descriptive Essay – As it sounds, this type of essay gives a description about a particular topic, or describes the traits and characteristics of something or a person in detail. It allows artistic freedom, and creates images in the minds of readers through the use of the five senses.
• Narrative Essay – Narrative essay is non- fiction , but describes a story with sensory descriptions. The writer not only tells a story, but also makes a point by giving reasons.
• Persuasive Essay – In this type of essay, the writer tries to convince his readers to adopt his position or point of view on an issue, after he provides them solid reasoning in this connection. It requires a lot of research to claim and defend an idea. It is also called an argumentative essay .

Non-literary essays could also be of the same types but they could be written in any format.

Examples of Essay in Literature

Example #1: the sacred grove of oshogbo (by jeffrey tayler).

“As I passed through the gates I heard a squeaky voice . A diminutive middle-aged man came out from behind the trees — the caretaker. He worked a toothbrush-sized stick around in his mouth, digging into the crevices between algae’d stubs of teeth. He was barefoot; he wore a blue batik shirt known as a buba, baggy purple trousers, and an embroidered skullcap. I asked him if he would show me around the shrine. Motioning me to follow, he spat out the results of his stick work and set off down the trail.”

This is an example of a descriptive essay , as the author has used descriptive language to paint a dramatic picture for his readers of an encounter with a stranger.

Example #2: Of Love (By Francis Bacon)

“It is impossible to love, and be wise … Love is a child of folly. … Love is ever rewarded either with the reciprocal, or with an inward and secret contempt. You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons…there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love: which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion…That he had preferred Helena, quitted the gifts of Juno and Pallas. For whosoever esteemeth too much of amorous affection quitted both riches and wisdom.”

In this excerpt, Bacon attempts to persuade readers that people who want to be successful in this world must never fall in love. By giving an example of famous people like Paris, who chose Helen as his beloved but lost his wealth and wisdom, the author attempts to convince the audience that they can lose their mental balance by falling in love.

Example #3: The Autobiography of a Kettle (By John Russell)

“ I am afraid I do not attract attention, and yet there is not a single home in which I could done without. I am only a small, black kettle but I have much to interest me, for something new happens to me every day. The kitchen is not always a cheerful place in which to live, but still I find plenty of excitement there, and I am quite happy and contented with my lot …”

In this example, the author is telling an autobiography of a kettle, and describes the whole story in chronological order. The author has described the kettle as a human being, and allows readers to feel, as he has felt.

Function of Essay

The function of an essay depends upon the subject matter, whether the writer wants to inform, persuade, explain, or entertain. In fact, the essay increases the analytical and intellectual abilities of the writer as well as readers. It evaluates and tests the writing skills of a writer, and organizes his or her thinking to respond personally or critically to an issue. Through an essay, a writer presents his argument in a more sophisticated manner. In addition, it encourages students to develop concepts and skills, such as analysis, comparison and contrast, clarity, exposition , conciseness, and persuasion .

Related posts:

• Elements of an Essay
• Narrative Essay
• Definition Essay
• Descriptive Essay
• Analytical Essay
• Argumentative Essay
• Cause and Effect Essay
• Critical Essay
• Expository Essay
• Persuasive Essay
• Process Essay
• Explicatory Essay
• An Essay on Man: Epistle I
• Comparison and Contrast Essay

Post navigation

What Is Composition? Definition, Types, and Examples

StockSnap / Pixabay

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In the literary sense, a composition (from the Latin "to put together") is the way a writer assembles words and sentences to create a coherent and meaningful work. Composition can also mean the activity of writing, the nature of the subject of a piece of writing, the piece of writing itself, and the name of a college course assigned to a student. This essay focuses on practicing how people write.

Key Takeaways

• In writing, composition refers to the way a writer structures a piece of writing.
• The four modes of composition, which were codified in the late 19th century, are description, narration, exposition, and argumentation.
• Good writing can include elements of multiple modes of composition.

Composition Definition

Just like a musician and an artist, a writer sets the tone of a composition to his or her purpose, making decisions about what that tone should be to form a structure. A writer might express anything from the point of view of cool logic to impassioned anger. A composition might use clean and simple prose, flowery, descriptive passages, or analytical nomenclature.

Since the 19th century, English writers and teachers have been grappling with ways to classify forms and modes of writing so beginner writers can have a place to start. After decades of struggle, rhetoricians ended up with four categories of writing that still make up the mainstream of Composition 101 college classes: Description, Narration , Exposition , and Argumentation .

Types of Composition Writing 

The four classical types of composition (description, narration, exposition, and argumentation) are not categories, per se. They would almost never stand alone in a piece of writing, but rather are best-considered modes of writing, pieces of writing styles that can be combined and used to create a whole. That is to say, they can inform a piece of writing, and they are good starting points for understanding how to put a piece of writing together.

Examples for each of the following composition types are based on the American poet Gertrude Stein's famous quote from " Sacred Emily ," her 1913 poem: "A rose is a rose is a rose."

Description

A description, or descriptive writing, is a statement or account that describes something or someone, listing characteristic features and significant details to provide a reader with a portrayal in words. Descriptions are set in the concrete, in the reality, or solidity of an object as a representation of a person, place, or thing in time. They provide the look and feel of objects, a simultaneous whole, with as many details as you'd like.

A description of a rose might include the color of the petals, the aroma of its perfume, where it exists in your garden, whether it is in a plain terracotta pot or a hothouse in the city.

A description of "Sacred Emily" might talk about the length of the poem and the facts of when it was written and published. It might list the images that Stein uses or mention her use of repetition and alliteration.

A narration, or narrative writing, is a personal account , a story that the writer tells his or her reader. It can be an account of a series of facts or events, given in order and establishing connections between the steps. It can even be dramatic, in which case you can present each individual scene with actions and dialog. The chronology could be in strict order, or you could include flashbacks.

A narration about a rose might describe how you first came across it, how it came to be in your garden, or why you went to the greenhouse that day.

A narration about "Sacred Emily" might be about how you came across the poem, whether it was in a class or in a book lent by a friend, or if you were simply curious about where the phrase "a rose is a rose" came from and found it on the internet.

Exposition, or expository writing , is the act of expounding or explaining a person, place, thing, or event. Your purpose is not to just describe something, but to give it a reality, an interpretation, your ideas on what that thing means. In some respects, you are laying out a proposition to explain a general notion or abstract idea of your subject.

An exposition on a rose might include its taxonomy, what its scientific and common names are, who developed it, what the impact was when it was announced to the public, and/or how was it distributed. 

An exposition on "Sacred Emily" could include the environment in which Stein wrote, where she was living, what her influences were, and what the impact was on reviewers.

Argumentation 

Also called argumentative writing , an argumentation is basically an exercise in comparing and contrasting. It is the methodological presentation of both sides of an argument using logical or formal reasoning. The end result is formulated to persuade why thing A is better than thing B. What you mean by "better" makes up the content of your arguments.

Argumentation applied to a rose might be why one particular rose is better than another, why you prefer roses over daisies, or vice versa.

Argumentation over "Sacred Emily" could compare it to Stein's other poems or to another poem covering the same general topic.

The Value of Composition

A great deal of debate enlivened college theoretical rhetoric in the 1970s and 1980s, with scholars attempting to throw off what they saw were the confining strictures of these four writing styles. Despite that, they remain the mainstay of some college composition classes.

What these four classical modes do is provide beginner writers a way to purposefully direct their writings, a structure on which to form an idea. However, they can also be limiting. Use the traditional modes of composition as tools to gain practice and direction in your writing, but remember that they should be considered starting points rather than rigid requirements.

• Bishop, Wendy. "Keywords in Creative Writing." David Starkey, Utah State University Press, University Press of Colorado, 2006.
• Conners, Professor Robert J. "Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy." Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture, Hardcover, New ed. Edition, University of Pittsburgh Press, June 1, 1997.
• D'Angelo, Frank. "Nineteenth-Century Forms/Modes of Discourse: A Critical Inquiry." Vol. 35, No. 1, National Council of Teachers of English, February 1984.
• Hintikka, Jaakko. "Strategic Thinking in Argumentation and Argumentation Theory." Vol. 50, No. 196 (2), Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1996.
• Perron, Jack. "Composition and Cognition." English Education, The Writing Teacher: A New Professionalism, Vol. 10, No. 3, National Council of Teachers of English, February 1979. 
•  Stein, Gertrude. "Sacred Emily." Geography and Plays, Letters of Note, 1922.
• Modes of Discourse (Composition)
• Definition and Examples of Narratives in Writing
• Models of Composition
• What Is Expository Writing?
• AP English Exam: 101 Key Terms
• Focusing in Composition
• Character Sketch in Composition
• Current-Traditional Rhetoric
• Coherence in Composition
• Description in Rhetoric and Composition
• Narratio in Rhetoric
• Topical Organization Essay
• Arrangement in Composition and Rhetoric
• Word Choice in English Composition and Literature
• The Writer's Voice in Literature and Rhetoric
• The Parts of a Speech in Classical Rhetoric

What is Essay? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Essay definition.

An essay (ES-ey) is a nonfiction composition that explores a concept, argument, idea, or opinion from the personal perspective of the writer. Essays are usually a few pages, but they can also be book-length. Unlike other forms of nonfiction writing, like textbooks or biographies, an essay doesn’t inherently require research. Literary essayists are conveying ideas in a more informal way.

The word essay comes from the Late Latin exigere , meaning “ascertain or weigh,” which later became essayer in Old French. The late-15th-century version came to mean “test the quality of.” It’s this latter derivation that French philosopher Michel de Montaigne first used to describe a composition.

History of the Essay

Michel de Montaigne first coined the term essayer to describe Plutarch’s Oeuvres Morales , which is now widely considered to be a collection of essays. Under the new term, Montaigne wrote the first official collection of essays, Essais , in 1580. Montaigne’s goal was to pen his personal ideas in prose . In 1597, a collection of Francis Bacon’s work appeared as the first essay collection written in English. The term essayist was first used by English playwright Ben Jonson in 1609.

Types of Essays

There are many ways to categorize essays. Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, determined that there are three major groups: personal and autobiographical, objective and factual, and abstract and universal. Within these groups, several other types can exist, including the following:

• Academic Essays : Educators frequently assign essays to encourage students to think deeply about a given subject and to assess the student’s knowledge. As such, an academic essay employs a formal language and tone, and it may include references and a bibliography. It’s objective and factual, and it typically uses a five-paragraph model of an introduction, two or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Several other essay types, like descriptive, argumentative, and expository, can fall under the umbrella of an academic essay.
• Analytical Essays : An analytical essay breaks down and interprets something, like an event, piece of literature, or artwork. This type of essay combines abstraction and personal viewpoints. Professional reviews of movies, TV shows, and albums are likely the most common form of analytical essays that people encounter in everyday life.
• Argumentative/Persuasive Essays : In an argumentative or persuasive essay, the essayist offers their opinion on a debatable topic and refutes opposing views. Their goal is to get the reader to agree with them. Argumentative/persuasive essays can be personal, factual, and even both at the same time. They can also be humorous or satirical; Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a satirical essay arguing that the best way for Irish people to get out of poverty is to sell their children to rich people as a food source.
• Descriptive Essays : In a descriptive essay, the essayist describes something, someone, or an event in great detail. The essay’s subject can be something concrete, meaning it can be experienced with any or all of the five senses, or abstract, meaning it can’t be interacted with in a physical sense.
• Expository Essay : An expository essay is a factual piece of writing that explains a particular concept or issue. Investigative journalists often write expository essays in their beat, and things like manuals or how-to guides are also written in an expository style.
• Narrative/Personal : In a narrative or personal essay, the essayist tells a story, which is usually a recounting of a personal event. Narrative and personal essays may attempt to support a moral or lesson. People are often most familiar with this category as many writers and celebrities frequently publish essay collections.

Notable Essayists

• James Baldwin, “ Notes of a Native Son ”
• Joan Didion, “ Goodbye To All That ”
• George Orwell, “ Shooting an Elephant ”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, “ Self-Reliance ”
• Virginia Woolf, " Three Guineas "

Examples of Literary Essays

1. Michel De Montaigne, “Of Presumption”

De Montaigne’s essay explores multiple topics, including his reasons for writing essays, his dissatisfaction with contemporary education, and his own victories and failings. As the father of the essay, Montaigne details characteristics of what he thinks an essay should be. His writing has a stream-of-consciousness organization that doesn’t follow a structure, and he expresses the importance of looking inward at oneself, pointing to the essay’s personal nature.

2. Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

Woolf’s feminist essay, written from the perspective of an unknown, fictional woman, argues that sexism keeps women from fully realizing their potential. Woolf posits that a woman needs only an income and a room of her own to express her creativity. The fictional persona Woolf uses is meant to teach the reader a greater truth: making both literal and metaphorical space for women in the world is integral to their success and wellbeing.

3. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”

In this essay, Baldwin argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin doesn’t serve the black community the way his contemporaries thought it did. He points out that it equates “goodness” with how well-assimilated the black characters are in white culture:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality […] is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; […] and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.

This essay is both analytical and argumentative. Baldwin analyzes the novel and argues against those who champion it.

Further Resources on Essays

Top Writing Tips offers an in-depth history of the essay.

The Harvard Writing Center offers tips on outlining an essay.

We at SuperSummary have an excellent essay writing resource guide .

Related Terms

• Academic Essay
• Argumentative Essay
• Expository Essay
• Narrative Essay
• Persuasive Essay

How to Write a Good English Literature Essay

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

How do you write a good English Literature essay? Although to an extent this depends on the particular subject you’re writing about, and on the nature of the question your essay is attempting to answer, there are a few general guidelines for how to write a convincing essay – just as there are a few guidelines for writing well in any field.

We at Interesting Literature  call them ‘guidelines’ because we hesitate to use the word ‘rules’, which seems too programmatic. And as the writing habits of successful authors demonstrate, there is no  one way to become a good writer – of essays, novels, poems, or whatever it is you’re setting out to write. The French writer Colette liked to begin her writing day by picking the fleas off her cat.

Edith Sitwell, by all accounts, liked to lie in an open coffin before she began her day’s writing. Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk, claiming he needed the scent of their decay to help him write. (For most student essay-writers, such an aroma is probably allowed to arise in the writing-room more organically, over time.)

We will address our suggestions for successful essay-writing to the average student of English Literature, whether at university or school level. There are many ways to approach the task of essay-writing, and these are just a few pointers for how to write a better English essay – and some of these pointers may also work for other disciplines and subjects, too.

Of course, these guidelines are designed to be of interest to the non-essay-writer too – people who have an interest in the craft of writing in general. If this describes you, we hope you enjoy the list as well. Remember, though, everyone can find writing difficult: as Thomas Mann memorably put it, ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Nora Ephron was briefer: ‘I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.’ So, the guidelines for successful essay-writing:

1. Planning is important, but don’t spend too long perfecting a structure that might end up changing.

This may seem like odd advice to kick off with, but the truth is that different approaches work for different students and essayists. You need to find out which method works best for you.

It’s not a bad idea, regardless of whether you’re a big planner or not, to sketch out perhaps a few points on a sheet of paper before you start, but don’t be surprised if you end up moving away from it slightly – or considerably – when you start to write.

Often the most extensively planned essays are the most mechanistic and dull in execution, precisely because the writer has drawn up a plan and refused to deviate from it. What  is a more valuable skill is to be able to sense when your argument may be starting to go off-topic, or your point is getting out of hand,  as you write . (For help on this, see point 5 below.)

We might even say that when it comes to knowing how to write a good English Literature essay,  practising  is more important than planning.

2. Make room for close analysis of the text, or texts.

Whilst it’s true that some first-class or A-grade essays will be impressive without containing any close reading as such, most of the highest-scoring and most sophisticated essays tend to zoom in on the text and examine its language and imagery closely in the course of the argument. (Close reading of literary texts arises from theology and the analysis of holy scripture, but really became a ‘thing’ in literary criticism in the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and other influential essayists started to subject the poem or novel to close scrutiny.)

Close reading has two distinct advantages: it increases the specificity of your argument (so you can’t be so easily accused of generalising a point), and it improves your chances of pointing up something about the text which none of the other essays your marker is reading will have said. For instance, take In Memoriam  (1850), which is a long Victorian poem by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson about his grief following the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in the early 1830s.

When answering a question about the representation of religious faith in Tennyson’s poem  In Memoriam  (1850), how might you write a particularly brilliant essay about this theme? Anyone can make a general point about the poet’s crisis of faith; but to look closely at the language used gives you the chance to show  how the poet portrays this.

For instance, consider this stanza, which conveys the poet’s doubt:

A solid and perfectly competent essay might cite this stanza in support of the claim that Tennyson is finding it increasingly difficult to have faith in God (following the untimely and senseless death of his friend, Arthur Hallam). But there are several ways of then doing something more with it. For instance, you might get close to the poem’s imagery, and show how Tennyson conveys this idea, through the image of the ‘altar-stairs’ associated with religious worship and the idea of the stairs leading ‘thro’ darkness’ towards God.

In other words, Tennyson sees faith as a matter of groping through the darkness, trusting in God without having evidence that he is there. If you like, it’s a matter of ‘blind faith’. That would be a good reading. Now, here’s how to make a good English essay on this subject even better: one might look at how the word ‘falter’ – which encapsulates Tennyson’s stumbling faith – disperses into ‘falling’ and ‘altar’ in the succeeding lines. The word ‘falter’, we might say, itself falters or falls apart.

That is doing more than just interpreting the words: it’s being a highly careful reader of the poetry and showing how attentive to the language of the poetry you can be – all the while answering the question, about how the poem portrays the idea of faith. So, read and then reread the text you’re writing about – and be sensitive to such nuances of language and style.

The best way to  become attuned to such nuances is revealed in point 5. We might summarise this point as follows: when it comes to knowing how to write a persuasive English Literature essay, it’s one thing to have a broad and overarching argument, but don’t be afraid to use the  microscope as well as the telescope.

3. Provide several pieces of evidence where possible.

Many essays have a point to make and make it, tacking on a single piece of evidence from the text (or from beyond the text, e.g. a critical, historical, or biographical source) in the hope that this will be enough to make the point convincing.

‘State, quote, explain’ is the Holy Trinity of the Paragraph for many. What’s wrong with it? For one thing, this approach is too formulaic and basic for many arguments. Is one quotation enough to support a point? It’s often a matter of degree, and although one piece of evidence is better than none, two or three pieces will be even more persuasive.

After all, in a court of law a single eyewitness account won’t be enough to convict the accused of the crime, and even a confession from the accused would carry more weight if it comes supported by other, objective evidence (e.g. DNA, fingerprints, and so on).

Let’s go back to the example about Tennyson’s faith in his poem  In Memoriam  mentioned above. Perhaps you don’t find the end of the poem convincing – when the poet claims to have rediscovered his Christian faith and to have overcome his grief at the loss of his friend.

You can find examples from the end of the poem to suggest your reading of the poet’s insincerity may have validity, but looking at sources beyond the poem – e.g. a good edition of the text, which will contain biographical and critical information – may help you to find a clinching piece of evidence to support your reading.

And, sure enough, Tennyson is reported to have said of  In Memoriam : ‘It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself.’ And there we have it: much more convincing than simply positing your reading of the poem with a few ambiguous quotations from the poem itself.

Of course, this rule also works in reverse: if you want to argue, for instance, that T. S. Eliot’s  The Waste Land is overwhelmingly inspired by the poet’s unhappy marriage to his first wife, then using a decent biographical source makes sense – but if you didn’t show evidence for this idea from the poem itself (see point 2), all you’ve got is a vague, general link between the poet’s life and his work.

Show  how the poet’s marriage is reflected in the work, e.g. through men and women’s relationships throughout the poem being shown as empty, soulless, and unhappy. In other words, when setting out to write a good English essay about any text, don’t be afraid to  pile on  the evidence – though be sensible, a handful of quotations or examples should be more than enough to make your point convincing.

4. Avoid tentative or speculative phrasing.

Many essays tend to suffer from the above problem of a lack of evidence, so the point fails to convince. This has a knock-on effect: often the student making the point doesn’t sound especially convinced by it either. This leaks out in the telling use of, and reliance on, certain uncertain  phrases: ‘Tennyson might have’ or ‘perhaps Harper Lee wrote this to portray’ or ‘it can be argued that’.

An English university professor used to write in the margins of an essay which used this last phrase, ‘What  can’t be argued?’

This is a fair criticism: anything can be argued (badly), but it depends on what evidence you can bring to bear on it (point 3) as to whether it will be a persuasive argument. (Arguing that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a Martian who came down to Earth and ingratiated himself with the world of Elizabethan theatre is a theory that can be argued, though few would take it seriously. We wish we could say ‘none’, but that’s a story for another day.)

Many essay-writers, because they’re aware that texts are often open-ended and invite multiple interpretations (as almost all great works of literature invariably do), think that writing ‘it can be argued’ acknowledges the text’s rich layering of meaning and is therefore valid.

Whilst this is certainly a fact – texts are open-ended and can be read in wildly different ways – the phrase ‘it can be argued’ is best used sparingly if at all. It should be taken as true that your interpretation is, at bottom, probably unprovable. What would it mean to ‘prove’ a reading as correct, anyway? Because you found evidence that the author intended the same thing as you’ve argued of their text? Tennyson wrote in a letter, ‘I wrote In Memoriam  because…’?

But the author might have lied about it (e.g. in an attempt to dissuade people from looking too much into their private life), or they might have changed their mind (to go back to the example of  The Waste Land : T. S. Eliot championed the idea of poetic impersonality in an essay of 1919, but years later he described  The Waste Land as ‘only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’ – hardly impersonal, then).

Texts – and their writers – can often be contradictory, or cagey about their meaning. But we as critics have to act responsibly when writing about literary texts in any good English essay or exam answer. We need to argue honestly, and sincerely – and not use what Wikipedia calls ‘weasel words’ or hedging expressions.

So, if nothing is utterly provable, all that remains is to make the strongest possible case you can with the evidence available. You do this, not only through marshalling the evidence in an effective way, but by writing in a confident voice when making your case. Fundamentally, ‘There is evidence to suggest that’ says more or less the same thing as ‘It can be argued’, but it foregrounds the  evidence rather than the argument, so is preferable as a phrase.

This point might be summarised by saying: the best way to write a good English Literature essay is to be honest about the reading you’re putting forward, so you can be confident in your interpretation and use clear, bold language. (‘Bold’ is good, but don’t get too cocky, of course…)

5. Read the work of other critics.

This might be viewed as the Holy Grail of good essay-writing tips, since it is perhaps the single most effective way to improve your own writing. Even if you’re writing an essay as part of school coursework rather than a university degree, and don’t need to research other critics for your essay, it’s worth finding a good writer of literary criticism and reading their work. Why is this worth doing?

Published criticism has at least one thing in its favour, at least if it’s published by an academic press or has appeared in an academic journal, and that is that it’s most probably been peer-reviewed, meaning that other academics have read it, closely studied its argument, checked it for errors or inaccuracies, and helped to ensure that it is expressed in a fluent, clear, and effective way.

If you’re serious about finding out how to write a better English essay, then you need to study how successful writers in the genre do it. And essay-writing is a genre, the same as novel-writing or poetry. But why will reading criticism help you? Because the critics you read can show you how to do all of the above: how to present a close reading of a poem, how to advance an argument that is not speculative or tentative yet not over-confident, how to use evidence from the text to make your argument more persuasive.

And, the more you read of other critics – a page a night, say, over a few months – the better you’ll get. It’s like textual osmosis: a little bit of their style will rub off on you, and every writer learns by the examples of other writers.

As T. S. Eliot himself said, ‘The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.’ Don’t get precious about your own distinctive writing style and become afraid you’ll lose it. You can’t  gain a truly original style before you’ve looked at other people’s and worked out what you like and what you can ‘steal’ for your own ends.

We say ‘steal’, but this is not the same as saying that plagiarism is okay, of course. But consider this example. You read an accessible book on Shakespeare’s language and the author makes a point about rhymes in Shakespeare. When you’re working on your essay on the poetry of Christina Rossetti, you notice a similar use of rhyme, and remember the point made by the Shakespeare critic.

This is not plagiarising a point but applying it independently to another writer. It shows independent interpretive skills and an ability to understand and apply what you have read. This is another of the advantages of reading critics, so this would be our final piece of advice for learning how to write a good English essay: find a critic whose style you like, and study their craft.

If you’re looking for suggestions, we can recommend a few favourites: Christopher Ricks, whose  The Force of Poetry is a tour de force; Jonathan Bate, whose  The Genius of Shakespeare , although written for a general rather than academic audience, is written by a leading Shakespeare scholar and academic; and Helen Gardner, whose  The Art of T. S. Eliot , whilst dated (it came out in 1949), is a wonderfully lucid and articulate analysis of Eliot’s poetry.

James Wood’s How Fiction Works  is also a fine example of lucid prose and how to close-read literary texts. Doubtless readers of  Interesting Literature will have their own favourites to suggest in the comments, so do check those out, as these are just three personal favourites. What’s your favourite work of literary scholarship/criticism? Suggestions please.

Much of all this may strike you as common sense, but even the most commonsensical advice can go out of your mind when you have a piece of coursework to write, or an exam to revise for. We hope these suggestions help to remind you of some of the key tenets of good essay-writing practice – though remember, these aren’t so much commandments as recommendations. No one can ‘tell’ you how to write a good English Literature essay as such.

But it can be learned. And remember, be interesting – find the things in the poems or plays or novels which really ignite your enthusiasm. As John Mortimer said, ‘The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.’

Finally, good luck – and happy writing!

And if you enjoyed these tips for how to write a persuasive English essay, check out our advice for how to remember things for exams  and our tips for becoming a better close reader of poetry .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

30 thoughts on “How to Write a Good English Literature Essay”

You must have taken AP Literature. I’m always saying these same points to my students.

I also think a crucial part of excellent essay writing that too many students do not realize is that not every point or interpretation needs to be addressed. When offered the chance to write your interpretation of a work of literature, it is important to note that there of course are many but your essay should choose one and focus evidence on this one view rather than attempting to include all views and evidence to back up each view.

Reblogged this on SocioTech'nowledge .

Not a bad effort…not at all! (Did you intend “subject” instead of “object” in numbered paragraph two, line seven?”

Oops! I did indeed – many thanks for spotting. Duly corrected ;)

That’s what comes of writing about philosophy and the subject/object for another post at the same time!

Reblogged this on Scribing English .

• Pingback: Recommended Resource: Interesting Literature.com & how to write an essay | Write Out Loud

Great post on essay writing! I’ve shared a post about this and about the blog site in general which you can look at here: http://writeoutloudblog.com/2015/01/13/recommended-resource-interesting-literature-com-how-to-write-an-essay/

All of these are very good points – especially I like 2 and 5. I’d like to read the essay on the Martian who wrote Shakespeare’s plays).

Reblogged this on Uniqely Mustered and commented: Dedicate this to all upcoming writers and lovers of Writing!

I shall take this as my New Year boost in Writing Essays. Please try to visit often for corrections,advise and criticisms.

Reblogged this on Blue Banana Bread .

Reblogged this on worldsinthenet .

All very good points, but numbers 2 and 4 are especially interesting.

• Pingback: Weekly Digest | Alpha Female, Mainstream Cat

Reblogged this on rainniewu .

Reblogged this on pixcdrinks .

• Pingback: How to Write a Good English Essay? Interesting Literature | EngLL.Com

Great post. Interesting infographic how to write an argumentative essay http://www.essay-profy.com/blog/how-to-write-an-essay-writing-an-argumentative-essay/

Reblogged this on DISTINCT CHARACTER and commented: Good Tips

Reblogged this on quirkywritingcorner and commented: This could be applied to novel or short story writing as well.

Reblogged this on rosetech67 and commented: Useful, albeit maybe a bit late for me :-)

• Pingback: How to Write a Good English Essay | georg28ang

such a nice pieace of content you shared in this write up about “How to Write a Good English Essay” going to share on another useful resource that is

• Pingback: Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: How to Remember Things for Exams | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: Michael Moorcock: How to Write a Novel in 3 Days | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: Shakespeare and the Essay | Interesting Literature

A well rounded summary on all steps to keep in mind while starting on writing. There are many new avenues available though. Benefit from the writing options of the 21st century from here, i loved it! http://authenticwritingservices.com

• Pingback: Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing | Peacejusticelove's Blog

Comments are closed.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons
• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

12.3: Prewriting for Literature Essays

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 40503

• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

The first step in writing a literary analysis essay is actually completing the reading. Sometimes the professor will give you a prompt before you read. If this is the case, look for material which relates to the prompt as you read. If the professor did not give you a prompt, look for any material in the assigned reading that piques your interest or relates to class discussions. Highlight or underline any moments in the reading which stick out to you: something you don't understand, something that relates to a topic you care about, or something weird or surprising. Keeping track of patterns, themes, or literary devices is a great way to engage with a work of literature and prepare for a future discussion or essay.

Completing the Reading

One time, I was talking with my sister-in-law about her experience in nursing school. Whereas her brother had barely achieved Cs in college, she somehow maintained a 4.0, even though she was simultaneously working and caring for her two young daughters.

"What is your secret to success?" I asked.

"Actually doing the assigned readings," she laughed, "most of my peers didn't. And it showed."

As a college professor who teaches reading-heavy classes, this is not a shock to me. After all, most students taking the required writing and literature courses do not wish to become English majors. They sometimes see their literature class as a means to an end: at best, a stepping stone towards their future career; at worst, a time-suck of hoops to jump through. Also, because of today's gig economy, many students are juggling multiple jobs in addition to multiple college classes. This makes it tempting for students to want to skip the readings and just read SparkNotes. Truth be told, students who pursue this method, depending on their BSing skills, might be able to pass a literature class. But for the vast majority of students, this popular high school tactic will not work at the college level. More importantly, it means students miss out on many of the exciting benefits of diving deep into analysis, discussion, and engaging with the text.

Of course, I want my students to fall in love with the written word. I want my passion for literature to be contagious, to light students' hearts and minds on fire with a hunger for the beauty of syntax and diction and literary devices. But I also completely understand that students have limited time. Therefore, I recommend prioritizing the writing process so students can make the most efficient use of their time. In the long run, while it might seem like skipping the readings saves time, completing the readings is actually the best way for students to optimize their time. This is because a strong essay depends on a deep understanding of the literature. If the class features examinations, these almost always test students on whether they completed and understand the readings. Finally, class will be more fun for students if they understand what their peers are talking about in class discussion, and what their professor is talking about during lectures.

Students who complete the readings and annotate as they go will find it much easier to flip back through their notes to find relevant quotations and information. They usually break the readings into small, manageable chunks of twenty to thirty minutes at a time. This helps their brains absorb the information better and retain information for writing and tests.

Students skipping reading often end up performing more work when it comes to writing an essay because they will spend so much time looking up text summaries on the internet (which may or may not be accurate or pertain to the intricacies of the assignment). They will also have to go back and re-read the text to find quotations that fit their prompt. Their essays usually fail because they do not fulfill the in-depth analysis required by the assignments.

So, long story short: even the most practically-minded, time-crunched students would do well to perform the readings. And, while in pursuit of success, a previously literature-averse student might find themselves liking literature more than they thought they would. Just like watching a favorite movie or show, reading a good book can be fun and relaxing!

Active versus Passive Reading

Many students, when first reading academic material, read it like they would a timeline of Facebook or Instagram posts: not fully attentive, skimming over the material in search of something interesting. Or they might read them with full attention, but simply read without questioning or engaging with the material. The difference between a student who is successful in a literature class and a student who is not successful is often that the successful student participates in active reading.

In a literature class, students encounter a lot of literature, written by many different authors. Annotating, or taking notes on the assigned literature as you read, is a way to have a conversation with the reading. This helps you better absorb the material and engage with the text on a deeper level. There are several annotation methods. These are like tools in a student's learning utility belt. Try them all out to discover which tools or combinations of tools help you learn best!

Margin Notes & Highlighting

One of the best ways to interact with a text is to write notes as you read. Underlining and/or highlighting relevant passages, yes, but also responding to the text in the margins. For instance, if a character I love makes a bad choice (like Sydney Carton in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities ), I will write, "Nooooo, Sydney Carton, don't sacrifice yourself for Lucie's sake!" This helps me remember the events of the plot. Many students also find it helpful to summarize each chapter or section of the literature as they read it. For example, a student said it was helpful for them to draw a picture representing every stanza of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth to help them understand what was being said. Other ideas include:

• Circling unfamiliar words
• Writing questions in the margins
• Color-coded highlighting to track various literary devices (i.e., blue for metaphors, pink for symbolism, and so forth)

Sticky Notes

For students who would like to sell their textbooks back to the bookstore, writing notes in the margins might not be a practical choice, as it may devalue the textbook or the bookstore may refuse to take it back. For these students, I recommend using sticky notes instead. If sticky notes are cost-prohibitive, most colleges have plenty of scrap paper students can use as bookmarks to stick between pages. This is also an eco-friendly way to re-use paper!

Reading Journal

Another option many students find helpful is keeping a reading journal. Students can write notes in their journals as they read. This helps students keep track of readings and materials in a chronological fashion. Just like when annotating the text directly or upon sticky notes, the most effective use of a reading journal, for learning purposes, is going to be active engagement with the text rather than passive absorption. That is, try to summarize the plot of what you read every time you read. Also, ask questions about the text. If you can record quotes and paraphrase along with in-text parenthetical citations (i.e., the page number where you found the material), this will optimize your time because you already have quotes ready to go when you write an essay!

Example of an Annotated Passage

Using the guidelines above, let's consider this excerpt from a scholarly article by Jacob Michael Leland, "'Yes, That is a Roll of Bills in My Pocket': The Economy of Masculinity in The Sun Also Rises."

A great deal of critical attention has been paid to masculine agency and its displacement in Ernest Hemingway's fiction. The story is familiar by now: the Hemingway hero loses some version of his maleness to the first World War and he replaces it with a tool—in Upper Michigan, a fishing rod or a pocket knife; in Africa, a hunting rifle—a new object that emblematizes his mastery over his surroundings and whose status as a fetishized commodity and Freudian symbolic significance is something less than subtle. In The Sun Also Rises , this pattern repeats itself, but with important differences that arise from the novel's cosmopolitan European setting. Mastery over the elements, here, has more to do with economic agency and control over social relationships than with nature and survival. The stakes are different, too; in the modern European city, the Hemingway hero recovers not only masculinity but also American identity in social and sexual interaction. (37)

In researching The Sun Also Rises for a project, Ling Ti found Leland's article. What follows is her annotated copy of the above excerpt:

Reflecting on Assigned Literature

Studies show reflecting on reading is one of the best ways to learn. This is called metacognition, or thinking about thinking. It is a way to keep track of the knowledge you have learned as you go. Students who reflect on their reading and learning tend to, as a whole, perform better on essays and examinations. So how can you take advantage of this skill?

If you have a prompt, choose a prompt and read through the assigned literature again, noting any quotes which may relate to the assigned topic. It is recommended at this point that you keep track of your observations in a document: either on a computer (Word, Google Docs) or on a physical piece of paper. Write down any quotations along with page numbers (fiction, nonfiction), line numbers (poem), or act, scene, line numbers (drama). This way, you have all potential evidence in one place, and it makes for easy in-text citations when it comes to knitting the evidence together to form an essay. In fact, it is highly recommended that students start an informal Works Cited page to keep track of every source consulted. This makes it much easier to avoid plagiarism by practicing ethical citation habits. For more information about citations, please see the Citations and Formatting Chapter.

Start with a hypothesis or focus but be willing to refine, adjust, or completely discard it if new evidence refutes it. An essay is not a stagnant piece, but a living, breathing thought experiment. Many students feel reluctant to change their thesis or major parts of their essays because they are afraid it means the previous writing was wasted. As a professional writer, editor, and scholar, I want to clue students in on a secret:

There is no such thing as wasted writing.

Even writing that does not end up in the final draft is worthwhile because it is a chance to experiment with ideas. It helps students find a path toward stronger ideas. Just like a gardener might allow branches of a tree to grow to see which ones bear flowers and fruit and then prune the weak, unproductive branches to make the plant stronger and more beautiful, so too must a writer be willing to cut out branches of reasoning which no longer serve the essay. But before you know which ideas or thoughts are worth pursuing, you first have to give them space to grow. You never know what idea branches might prove fruitful!

Contributors and Attributions

• Adapted from "Reading Like a Professional" in Writing and Literature: Composition as Inquiry, Learning, Thinking, and Communication by Dr. Tanya Long Bennett of the University of North Georgia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, expert's guide to the ap literature exam.

Advanced Placement (AP)

If you're planning to take the AP English Literature and Composition exam, you'll need to get familiar with what to expect on the test. Whether the 2023 test date of Wednesday, May 3, is near or far, I'm here to help you get serious about preparing for the exam.

In this guide, I'll go over the test's format and question types, how it's graded, best practices for preparation, and test-day tips. You'll be on your way to AP English Lit success in no time!

AP English Literature: Exam Format and Question Types

The AP Literature Exam is a three-hour exam that contains two sections in this order:

• An hour-long, 55-question multiple-choice section
• A two-hour, three-question free-response section

The exam tests your ability to analyze works and excerpts of literature and cogently communicate that analysis in essay form.

Read on for a breakdown of the two different sections and their question types.

Section I: Multiple Choice

The multiple-choice section, or Section I of the AP Literature exam, is 60 minutes long and has 55 questions. It counts for 45% of your overall exam grade .

You can expect to see five excerpts of prose and poetry. You will always get at least two prose passages (fiction or drama) and two poetry passages. In general, you will not be given the author, date, or title for these works, though occasionally the title of a poem will be given. Unusual words are also sometimes defined for you.

The date ranges of these works could fall from the 16th to the 21st century. Most works will be originally written in English, but you might occasionally see a passage in translation.

There are, generally speaking, eight kinds of questions you can expect to see on the AP English Literature and Composition exam. I'll break each of them down here and give you tips on how to identify and approach them.

"Pretty flowers carried by ladies" is not one of the question types.

The 8 Multiple-Choice Question Types on the AP Literature Exam

Without further delay, here are the eight question types you can expect to see on the AP Lit exam. All questions are taken from the sample questions on the AP Course and Exam Description .

#1: Reading Comprehension

These questions test your ability to understand what the passage is saying on a pretty basic level . They don't require you to do a lot of interpretation—you just need to know what's going on.

You can identify this question type from words and phrases such as "according to," "mentioned," "asserting," and so on. You'll succeed on these questions as long as you carefully read the text . Note that you might have to go back and reread parts to make sure you understand what the passage is saying.

#2: Inference

These questions ask you to infer something—a character or narrator's opinion, an author's intention, etc.—based on what is said in the passage . It will be something that isn't stated directly or concretely but that you can assume based on what's clearly written in the passage. You can identify these questions from words such as "infer" and "imply."

The key to these questions is to not get tripped up by the fact that you are making an inference—there will be a best answer, and it will be the choice that is best supported by what is actually found in the passage .

In many ways, inference questions are like second-level reading comprehension questions: you need to know not just what a passage says, but also what it means.

#3: Identifying and Interpreting Figurative Language

These are questions for which you have to either identify what word or phrase is figurative language or provide the meaning of a figurative phrase . You can identify these as they will either explicitly mention figurative language (or a figurative device, such as a simile or metaphor ) or include a figurative phrase in the question itself.

The meaning of figurative phrases can normally be determined by that phrase's context in the passage—what is said around it? What is the phrase referring to?

Example 1: Identifying

Example 2: Interpreting

#4: Literary Technique

These questions involve identifying why an author does what they do , from using a particular phrase to repeating certain words. Basically, what techniques is the author using to construct the passage/poem, and to what effect?

You can identify these questions by words/phrases such as "serves chiefly to," "effect," "evoke," and "in order to." A good way to approach these questions is to ask yourself: so what? Why did the author use these particular words or this particular structure?

#5: Character Analysis

These questions ask you to describe something about a character . You can spot them because they will refer directly to characters' attitudes, opinions, beliefs, or relationships with other characters .

This is, in many ways, a special kind of inference question , since you are inferring the broader personality of the character based on the evidence in a passage. Also, these crop up much more commonly for prose passages than they do for poetry ones.

#6: Overall Passage Questions

Some questions ask you to identify or describe something about the passage or poem as a whole : its purpose, tone, genre, etc. You can identify these by phrases such as "in the passage" and "as a whole."

To answer these questions, you need to think about the excerpt with a bird's-eye view . What is the overall picture created by all the tiny details?

#7: Structure

Some AP Lit questions will ask you about specific structural elements of the passage: a shift in tone, a digression, the specific form of a poem, etc . Often these questions will specify a part of the passage/poem and ask you to identify what that part is accomplishing.

Being able to identify and understand the significance of any shifts —structural, tonal, in genre, and so on—will be of key importance for these questions.

#8: Grammar/Nuts & Bolts

Very occasionally you will be asked a specific grammar question , such as what word an adjective is modifying. I'd also include in this category super-specific questions such as those that ask about the meter of a poem (e.g., iambic pentameter).

These questions are less about literary artistry and more about the fairly dry technique involved in having a fluent command of the English language .

That covers the eight question types on the multiple-choice section. Now, let's take a look at the free-response section of the AP Literature exam.

Keep track of the nuts and bolts of grammar.

Section II: Free Response

The AP Literature Free Response section is two hours long and involves three free-response essay questions , so you'll have about 40 minutes per essay. That's not a lot of time considering this section of the test counts for 55% of your overall exam grade !

Note, though, that no one will prompt you to move from essay to essay, so you can theoretically divide up the time however you want. Just be sure to leave enough time for each essay! Skipping an essay, or running out of time so you have to rush through one, can really impact your final test score.

The first two essays are literary analysis essays of specific passages, with one poem and one prose excerpt. The final essay is an analysis of a given theme in a work selected by you , the student.

Essays 1 & 2: Literary Passage Analysis

For the first two essays, you'll be presented with an excerpt and directed to analyze the excerpt for a given theme, device, or development . One of the passages will be poetry, and one will be prose. You will be provided with the author of the work, the approximate date, and some orienting information (i.e., the plot context of an excerpt from a novel).

Below are some sample questions from the 2022 Free Response Questions .

Essay 3: Thematic Analysis

For the third and final essay, you'll be asked to discuss a particular theme in a work that you select . You will be provided with a list of notable works that address the given theme below the prompt, but you can also choose to discuss any "work of literary merit."

So while you do have the power to choose which work you wish to write an essay about , the key words here are "literary merit." That means no genre fiction! Stick to safe bets like authors in the list on pages 10-11 of the old 2014 AP Lit Course Description .

(I know, I know—lots of genre fiction works do have literary merit and Shakespeare actually began as low culture, and so on and so forth. Indeed, you might find academic designations of "literary merit" elitist and problematic, but the time to rage against the literary establishment is not your AP Lit test! Save it for a really, really good college admissions essay instead .)

Here's a sample question from 2022:

As you can see, the list of works provided spans many time periods and countries : there are ancient Greek plays ( Antigone ), modern literary works (such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale ), Shakespeare plays ( The Tempest ), 19th-century English plays ( The Importance of Being Earnest ), etc. So you have a lot to work with!

Also note that you can choose a work of "comparable literary merit." That means you can select a work not on this list as long as it's as difficult and meaningful as the example titles you've been given. So for example, Jane Eyre or East of Eden would be great choices, but Twilight or The Hunger Games would not.

Our advice? If you're not sure what a work of "comparable literary merit" is, stick to the titles on the provided list .

You might even see something by this guy.

How Is the AP Literature Test Graded?

The multiple-choice section of the exam comprises 45% of your total exam score; the three essays, or free-response section, comprise the other 55%. Each essay, then, is worth about 18% of your grade.

As on other AP exams, your raw score will be converted to a score from 1-5 . You don't have to get every point possible to get a 5 by any means. In 2022, 16.9% of students received 5s on the AP English Literature test, the 14th highest 5 score out of the 38 different AP exams.

So, how do you calculate your raw scores?

Multiple-Choice Scoring

For the multiple-choice section, you receive 1 point for each question you answer correctly . There's no guessing penalty, so you should answer every question—but guess only after you're able to eliminate any answer you know is wrong to up your chances of choosing the right one.

Free-Response Scoring

Scoring for multiple choice is pretty straightforward; however, essay scoring is a little more complicated.

Each of your essays will receive a score from 0 to 6 based on the College Board rubric , which also includes question-specific rubrics. All the rubrics are very similar, with only minor differences between them.

Each essay rubric has three elements you'll be graded on:

• Thesis (0-1 points)
• Evidence and Commentary (0-4 points)
• Sophistication (0-1 points)

We'll be looking at the current rubric for the AP Lit exam , which was released in September 2019, and what every score means for each of the three elements above:

To get a high-scoring essay in the 5-6 point range, you'll need to not only come up with an original and intriguing argument that you thoroughly support with textual evidence, but you’ll also need to stay focused, organized, and clear. And all in just 40 minutes per essay!

If getting a high score on this section sounds like a tall order, that's because it is.

Practice makes perfect!

Skill-Building for Success on the AP Literature Exam

There are several things you can do to hone your skills and best prepare for the AP Lit exam.

Read Some Books, Maybe More Than Once

One of the most important steps you can take to prepare for the AP Literature and Composition exam is to read a lot and read well . You'll be reading a wide variety of notable literary works in your AP English Literature course, but additional reading will help you further develop your analytical reading skills .

I suggest checking out this list of notable authors in the 2014 AP Lit Course Description (pages 10-11).

In addition to reading broadly, you'll want to become especially familiar with the details of four to five books with different themes so you'll be prepared to write a strong student-choice essay. You should know the plot, themes, characters, and structural details of these books inside and out.

See my AP English Literature Reading List for more guidance.

Read (and Interpret) Poetry

One thing students might not do very much on their own time but that will help a lot with AP Lit exam prep is to read poetry. Try to read poems from a lot of eras and authors to get familiar with the language.

We know that poetry can be intimidating. That's why we've put together a bunch of guides to help you crack the poetry code (so to speak). You can learn more about poetic devices —like imagery and i ambic pentameter —in our comprehensive guide. Then you can see those analytical skills in action in our expert analysis of " Do not go gentle into that good night " by Dylan Thomas.

When you think you have a grip on basic comprehension, you can then move on to close reading (see below).

Hone Your Close Reading and Analysis Skills

Your AP class will likely focus heavily on close reading and analysis of prose and poetry, but extra practice won't hurt you. Close reading is the ability to identify which techniques the author is using and why. You'll need to be able to do this both to gather evidence for original arguments on the free-response questions and to answer analytical multiple-choice questions.

Here are some helpful close reading resources for prose :

• University of Wisconsin-Madison Writing Center's guide to close reading
• Harvard College Writing Center's close reading guide
• Purdue OWL's article on steering clear of close reading "pitfalls"

And here are some for poetry :

• University of Wisconsin-Madison's poetry-reading guide
• This guide to reading poetry at Poets.org (complete with two poetry close readings)
• Our own expert analyses of famous poems, such as " Ozymandias ", and the 10 famous sonnets you should know

Learn Literary and Poetic Devices

You'll want to be familiar with literary terms so that any test questions that ask about them will make sense to you. Again, you'll probably learn most of these in class, but it doesn't hurt to brush up on them.

Here are some comprehensive lists of literary terms with definitions :

• The 31 Literary Devices You Must Know
• The 20 Poetic Devices You Must Know
• The 9 Literary Elements You'll Find In Every Story
• What Is Imagery?
• Understanding Assonance
• What Is Iambic Pentameter in Poetry?
• Simile vs Metaphor: The 1 Big Difference
• 10 Personification Examples in Poetry, Literature, and More

Practice Writing Essays

The majority of your grade on the AP English Lit exam comes from essays, so it's critical that you practice your timed essay-writing skills . You of course should use the College Board's released free-response questions to practice writing complete timed essays of each type, but you can also practice quickly outlining thorough essays that are well supported with textual evidence.

Take Practice Tests

Taking practice tests is a great way to prepare for the exam. It will help you get familiar with the exam format and overall experience . You can get sample questions from the Course and Exam Description , the College Board website , and our guide to AP English Lit practice test resources .

Be aware that the released exams don't have complete slates of free-response questions, so you might need to supplement these with released free-response questions .

Since there are three complete released exams, you can take one toward the beginning of your prep time to get familiar with the exam and set a benchmark, and one toward the end to make sure the experience is fresh in your mind and to check your progress.

Don't wander like a lonely cloud through your AP Lit prep.

AP Literature: 6 Critical Test-Day Tips

Before we wrap up, here are my six top tips for AP Lit test day:

• #1: On the multiple-choice section, it's to your advantage to answer every question. If you eliminate all the answers you know are wrong before guessing, you'll raise your chances of guessing the correct one.
• #2: Don't rely on your memory of the passage when answering multiple-choice questions (or when writing essays, for that matter). Look back at the passage!
• #3: Interact with the text : circle, mark, underline, make notes—whatever floats your boat. This will help you retain information and actively engage with the passage.
• #4: This was mentioned above, but it's critical that you know four to five books well for the student-choice essay . You'll want to know all the characters, the plot, the themes, and any major devices or motifs the author uses throughout.
• #5: Be sure to plan out your essays! Organization and focus are critical for high-scoring AP Literature essays. An outline will take you a few minutes, but it will help your writing process go much faster.
• #6: Manage your time on essays closely. One strategy is to start with the essay you think will be the easiest to write. This way you'll be able to get through it while thinking about the other two essays.

And don't forget to eat breakfast! Apron optional.

AP Literature Exam: Key Takeaways

The AP Literature exam is a three-hour test that includes an hour-long multiple-choice section based on five prose and poetry passages and with 55 questions, and a two-hour free-response section with three essays : one analyzing a poetry passage, one analyzing a prose passage, and one analyzing a work chosen by you, the student.

The multiple-choice section is worth 45% of your total score , and the free-response section is worth 55% . The three essays are each scored on a rubric of 0-6, and raw scores are converted to a final scaled score from 1 to 5.

Here are some things you can do to prepare for the exam:

• Read books and be particularly familiar with four to five works for the student-choice essays
• Read poetry
• Work on your close reading and analysis skills
• Learn common literary devices
• Practice writing essays
• Take practice tests!

On test day, be sure to really look closely at all the passages and really interact with them by marking the text in a way that makes sense to you. This will help on both multiple-choice questions and the free-response essays. You should also outline your essays before you write them.

With all this in mind, you're well on your way to AP Lit success!

What's Next?

If you're taking other AP exams this year, you might be interested in our other AP resources: from the Ultimate Guide to the US History Exam , to the Ultimate AP Chemistry Study Guide , to the Best AP Psychology Study Guide , we have tons of articles on AP courses and exams for you !

Looking for practice exams? Here are some tips on how to find the best AP practice tests . We've also got comprehensive lists of practice tests for AP Psychology , AP Biology , AP Chemistry , and AP US History .

Deciding which APs to take? Take a look through the complete list of AP courses and tests , read our analysis of which AP classes are the hardest and easiest , and learn how many AP classes you should take .

Ellen has extensive education mentorship experience and is deeply committed to helping students succeed in all areas of life. She received a BA from Harvard in Folklore and Mythology and is currently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University.

Ask a Question Below

Have any questions about this article or other topics? Ask below and we'll reply!

Improve With Our Famous Guides

• For All Students

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 160+ SAT Points

How to Get a Perfect 1600, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 800 on Each SAT Section:

Score 800 on SAT Math

Score 800 on SAT Reading

Score 800 on SAT Writing

Series: How to Get to 600 on Each SAT Section:

Score 600 on SAT Math

Score 600 on SAT Reading

Score 600 on SAT Writing

Free Complete Official SAT Practice Tests

What SAT Target Score Should You Be Aiming For?

15 Strategies to Improve Your SAT Essay

The 5 Strategies You Must Be Using to Improve 4+ ACT Points

How to Get a Perfect 36 ACT, by a Perfect Scorer

Series: How to Get 36 on Each ACT Section:

36 on ACT English

36 on ACT Math

36 on ACT Reading

36 on ACT Science

Series: How to Get to 24 on Each ACT Section:

24 on ACT English

24 on ACT Math

24 on ACT Reading

24 on ACT Science

What ACT target score should you be aiming for?

ACT Vocabulary You Must Know

ACT Writing: 15 Tips to Raise Your Essay Score

How to Get Into Harvard and the Ivy League

How to Get a Perfect 4.0 GPA

How to Write an Amazing College Essay

What Exactly Are Colleges Looking For?

Is the ACT easier than the SAT? A Comprehensive Guide

Should you retake your SAT or ACT?

When should you take the SAT or ACT?

Stay Informed

Get the latest articles and test prep tips!

Looking for Graduate School Test Prep?

Check out our top-rated graduate blogs here:

GRE Online Prep Blog

GMAT Online Prep Blog

TOEFL Online Prep Blog

Holly R. "I am absolutely overjoyed and cannot thank you enough for helping me!”

Literary composition

• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is writing?
• 3 The Writing Process
• 4 Modes of Writing
• 5 Real World Writing vs. Classroom Writing
• 6.1 Go Speed, Go!
• 6.2 Slow Down, Pardner!
• 6.3 You Have Chosen Wisely

Writing Center

Introduction [ edit | edit source ]

Although quite dated, this essay from Alfred M. Hitchcock's 1923 book, High School English Book provides a purposeful, real-world definition of composition:

What is writing? [ edit | edit source ]

Take a few minutes to think about what writing means to you. If you close your eyes, lean back, and think about writing, what comes to your mind? Do you imagine a journalist sitting behind a cluttered oak desk pounding away on an old Underwood typewriter? Do you imagine a young woman curled up in the corner of a trendy coffeeshop scribbling angrily in a tattered journal? Do you imagine a middle-aged man jotting a grocery list on a small, flip-top notepad? Do you imagine a small child scrawling page after page of jagged, swirling crayon monsters? Or a teenager flipping madly through an encyclopedia the night before a paper is due, desperate to come up with a decent 3 to 5 page paper?

In truth, writing is all of these things, but it is also much more. Writing is more than just a part of school that you dread. It's more than 5 page essays or 1 page reading responses or even 400 page bestselling novels. One thing to keep in mind is this: writing is NOT a product. Some traditional models for teaching writing have treated writing as a product that is created. An end to a means.

We, here at the Writing Center, take the alternate, more progressive view. The view that writing is a means to an end. Writing is a process, a method, a means of discovery that leads the writer to new ideas and new discoveries. Writing is thinking. Through writing you make connections between previous experiences and ideas and new areas of thought that you are experiencing. Writing should be, and can be, a transcendent experience, in which the writer leaves his/her normal mode of thinking and transcends to a new mode of thinking. It is through writing that we can achieve not only new ideas, but new ways to develop new ideas.

That's not to say that all writing is transcendental. Some writing is just writing. At its most basic, writing is communicating.

How about this. You write your composition so well that you don't need any editing!

The Writing Process [ edit | edit source ]

The writing process is just that: the process one goes through while writing. There are variations on the details of the cycle, but the core components never change: Prewriting, drafting, editing, proofreading, and publishing.

• Prewriting - Prewriting is exactly what the word indicates: what you do before you write. Gathering your ideas together, organizing them into coherent notes, and figuring out what you need to know. You need to know your purpose in writing as well as your audience . Knowing all of this ahead of time makes writing your first draft much easier.
• Drafting - This is the process of getting all those ideas in your head down on paper. It is not important that the spelling, mechanics, or grammar make sense. It is more than likely that many of your ideas will be incomplete, and will need severe reworking. No writer ever considered the first version of anything to be finished. However, no writer ever finished anything without a rough draft!
• Editing - Now that the ideas are all on paper, you have to see if those thoughts are anything like what you really wanted to say. A suggestion is to put your writing away for awhile and return to it with fresh eyes. This way, you will not be tempted to change things on the spur of the moment. As you edit, make whatever corrections you feel are necessary. At first, the corrections will probably be global revisions where you will move, remove, or rewrite entire sections of your draft. After corrections are made, make another draft. All good writers repeat the drafting ->editing cycle more than once. What may seem like a good idea at the time may seem completely unnecessary a few days later. Eventually, however, this repetition will result in something that you would like to consider a final draft .
• Proofreading - Now that you have your final draft, it's time to proofread. This is where you make sure that all the i's are dotted, and the t's are crossed. Each sentence must have its subject and predicate, paragraphs indented, and spelling corrections made. Any changes that must be made are made, and the piece is finally ready for the final step in the writing process.
• Publishing - The end result of your labors, publishing is the goal that you have been pushing for. Publishing does not necessarily mean "printed in a magazine." In order for a work to be published, it must simply be considered complete by the author and read by others. Handing an essay in for a grade is publishing, as is submitting a novel to your editor.

This process naturally exists for all serious writers, however, many aspiring writers may want to skip the editing and proofreading stages. This is a major mistake! While you can pay people to revise and proofread for you, there is no guarantee that these mercenaries will accurately reflect your thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Every responsible writer follows these steps, and even after publication will revisit their works again and again.

Modes of Writing [ edit | edit source ]

Following the traditional schools of thought, there are different types of writing called modes . Each mode of writing has an individual purpose and there are several conventions for each mode.

* Exposition - Expository writing is used to explain an idea or position. Exposition usually involves a well-thought out thesis statement . Examples include literature analysis, definition of terms, or explanation of a new theory.

* Persuasion - Persuasive writing is where a writer attempts to convince the reader to take their view about a particular subject or concept. Examples include political speeches or advertising.

* Narration - Narrative writing tells a story. It uses a sequence of events with a common theme to convey or evoke emotions in the reader. Examples include autobiographies, anecdotes, or travel journals.

* Description - Descriptive writing is used primarily to recreate a particular time, place, or event for the reader. Often, descriptive writing will appeal to all five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Examples include travel literature, food reviews, or sales brochures.

* Creative Expression - Creative expression can use all of the other four modes of writing. However, instead of using the modes for the benefit of the reader, creative expression uses them to show the feelings and emotions of the author. Examples include poetry, short stories, or plays.

Modes of writing are not mutually exclusive. Each can be combined with any of the other modes, depending on the purpose of the work desired by the author. For instance, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle , while primarily a method of creative expression uses narration and detailed description to frame the problems with the meat industry over the course of the novel. Travel companies frequently will use a particularly adept description of a beautiful location in an attempt to persuade you to pay them money to visit that particular spot. Many a college student use a combination of exposition and persuasion for their professors while trying to get a good grade.

The particular combination of writing modes will change based upon your writing needs. However, if you are having trouble writing, a good starting point would be to ask yourself What is my purpose in writing? Which writing mode does my purpose seem to be for? Using this as a basis for beginning, you can incorporate the different modes as circumstances require.

Real World Writing vs. Classroom Writing [ edit | edit source ]

There is a gigantic difference between the writing that is done in the real world and the formal writing required for the classroom. The difference lies in the purpose of your writing. Often times, real world writing is informal. We want to write a letter to a friend, keep some thoughts in a journal, or write a memo to your boss. Each of these has a purpose that will change with the situation. The letter is an informal communication. Your journal is personal. The memo to your boss is informational. However, the formality of classroom writing has only one purpose: to communicate your thought processes to the instructor. As a result of this change in purpose, there are several norms that must be adhered to.

First, your professor is looking for something specific. Whether it is an understanding of a particular theme in a novel, the philosophical treatises of John Locke, or the results of your chemistry experiment gone wrong, there is certain information that the instructor of a class wants. This information drives all classroom writing. You, as the writer, tailor your writing to the needs of the audience. Since you want to appear to be an educated person who has navigated the ways of the educational community, your writing must have spotless grammar and mechanics, as well as a dutifully constructed thesis with the appropriate support. At the end of this process, often times you have produced a work that is satisfactory for your professor and other academics, but often mundane and boring for anyone not interested in the fundamental philosophical concepts that link the theories of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates. Enter the real world.

Real world writing must engage the reader at its most basic level. If, at any point the author loses the interest of the reader, then the point of the work is lost. Should that memo to your boss digress toward the theme of how you digested your lunch, he will probably just throw it away and completely disregard the fact that your mistake cost the business $500,000. Oops. When he ends up reading the financial reports at the end of the quarter, your job is going to be a lot harder to justify than why you mentioned that sandwich two months ago. The letter to a friend is to tell about the misery that you are experiencing since you lost your job. She's probably not interested in the details of the meeting with your boss, but wants to see how you are feeling now that you are unemployed.

Purpose dictates everything in the world of writing. It is important to consider not only your audience, but why you are writing in the first place. In the classroom, your purpose is clear, while in the real world, it can be a little tricky to keep your audience under your thumb.

The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: What Works Best for You? [ edit | edit source ]

As technology has changed over the years, so have writing methods. Centuries ago, clay tablets with scribes gave way to quill and inkwell, which in turn matured into the ballpoint pen. In the 20th century alone, pen gave way to the typewriter, which shifted to the word processor and the computer. Even though the nature of writing itself has not changed, the process of that writing has. What has technology brought writers in the 21st century that they did not have in the 1st?

Go Speed, Go! [ edit | edit source ]

The trouble with writing has always been getting the ideas from the brain to the paper. In ancient times, one sentence might take quite some time to write down (due to the physics of clay and stone). As a result, people thought about what they wanted to say more, then wrote it down. Today, many people can type close to (and faster than) 150 words per minute. That's a lot of writing to be pushing through into the world. However, does that necessarily make it better writing? No.

Just because we can write faster, does not mean that we write better. However, now it's easier to see what you're writing before you publish it. Drafts can be written and rewritten much faster than before. Many writers find it easier to punch out a quick draft now, then put it away and polish it later. The time saved by using a word processor in drafting alone makes it a much more productive tool than was ever in use before. However, many people still use the time-tested pen and paper for their drafting. What gives? Isn't it time they moved into the technological age and gave up such archaic methods?

Slow Down, Pardner! [ edit | edit source ]

While writing faster may be useful for some people, the blank screen can be just as intimidating as the blank piece of paper. In order to overcome this writer's block, many writers feel comfortable with their pen in hand, and pad on the table. The feeling of writing becomes solid to them, as if they are sculpting words instead of just pushing them out of their heads. The time it takes for them to write becomes a comfortable pause as they take time to massage each word with the gentle push of their fingertips instead of the harsh push of a button on a keyboard.

In addition to the comfort factor, there are many times where writing with laptops, Palm Pilots, or other technological gadgets is simply too cumbersome. Having to type with thumbs on a crowded train may not be as easy as scribbling down a few lines of prose on the back of a newspaper or coffee napkin. Sometimes the need to write strikes when the only thing handy is a chewed down pencil and the envelope from last month's rent receipt. When writers want to write, they must write!

You Have Chosen Wisely [ edit | edit source ]

Whatever method you choose for writing, it must be comfortable for you and your writing style. If you are the type that thinks fast and types faster, then a laptop might be the perfect writing tool for you. If you like to ponder your words before writing, then give pen and paper a try. More likely than not, you'll use a combination of the two. You'll type when you like it, and you'll write when you want to. Even though it seems like an extra step, transferring handwritten lines to a computer may be that drafting step that moves your rough stony work along the path towards that literary diamond that you've been polishing in your head for ages.

Don't be afraid to try your hand at any method that comes your way. One day, something will come along to replace the word processor, and writers will yet again have to adjust to another method of writing. However, until that day comes, many of us feel comfortable with pen in hand and paper on the table, waiting for inspiration to strike. At least we won't have to go back to those absurdly tedious stone tablets.

See also [ edit | edit source ]

• Topic:Literary Studies (look for the Composition course)

Navigation menu

Essay 3: A How-To Guide

What makes an effective researched argument.

Goal: The goal of any literary research paper is to add an original interpretation to a scholarly conversation about a literary text. Take a look at how rhetorical and literary theorist Kenneth Burke describes all acts of researched writing:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. [1] [2]

In a researched argument, you should:

• Establish the scholarly conversation that you are entering.
• Engage in debate with other scholars by analyzing the literary text
• Form an original interpretation about the literary text through close reading

Introductions

• Develops an interpretive or intellectual problem—either drawn from research into how other scholars have interpreted the poem or short story or drawn from a detail in the story itself that bears some tension, irony, ambiguity, or disjunction that connects to a larger scholarly conversation.
• Adds new evidence
• Adds a new interpretation
• Disagrees with a previous interpretation

Sample Introductions

The Introduction should accomplish four steps:

• Establish an Interpretive Problem: Observe the juxtaposing elements in the story that have caused an interpretive gap or tension and establish the significance of these elements.
• Describe a Major Interpretive Debate: Describe, in a couple of sentences, how various scholars have approached this text, genre, or work from this poet/time period. What problems have emerged in writing about this exhibit? What conversation are you joining?
• Thesis Statement: After reviewing the previous scholarship, state your claim. What are you arguing in this paper?
• Road Map: How are you going to support your argument? What’s the layout for this paper?

Take a look at the sample introductions from Laura Wilder and Joanna Wolfe’s  Digging into Literature.  [3]   Where/How does this introduction accomplish each of these four steps?

Schwab, Melinda. “A Watch for Emily.” Studies in Short Fiction 28.2 (1991): 215-17.

The critical attention given to the subject of time in Faulkner most certainly fills as many pages as the longest novel of Yoknapatawpha County. A goodly number of those pages of criticism deal with the well-known short story, “A Rose for Emily.” Several scholars, most notably Paul McGlynn, have worked to untangle the confusing chronology of this work (461-62). Others have given a variety of symbolic and psychological reasons for Emily Grierson’s inability (or refusal) to acknowledge the passage of time. Yet in all of this careful literary analysis, no one has discussed one troubling and therefore highly significant detail. When we first meet Miss Emily, she carries in a pocket somewhere within her clothing an “invisible watch ticking at the end of [a] gold chain” (Faulkner 121). What would a woman like Emily Grierson, who seems to us fixed in the past and oblivious to any passing of time, need with a watch? An awareness of the significance of this watch, however, is crucial for a clear understanding of Miss Emily herself. The watch’s placement in her pocket, its unusually loud ticking, and the chain to which it is attached illustrate both her attempts to control the passage of years and the consequences of such an ultimately futile effort (215).

Fick, Thomas, and Eva Gold. “’He Liked Men’: Homer, Homosexuality, and the Culture of Manhood in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily.’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 8.1 (2007): 99-107.

Over the last few years critics have discussed homosexuality in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” one of Faulkner’s most frequently anthologized works and a mainstay of literature classes at all levels. Hal Blythe, for example, asserts outright that Homer Barron is gay, while in a more nuanced reading James Wallace argues that the narrator merely wishes to suggest that Barron is homosexual in order to implicate the reader in a culture of gossip (Blythe 49-50; Wallace 105-07). Both readings rest on this comment by the narrator: “Then we said, ‘She will persuade him yet,’ because Homer himself had remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men at the Elks’ Club—that he was not a marrying man” (Faulkner 126)…While we agree that the narrator’s comment suggests something important about Homer’s sexual orientation, in contrast with Blythe we believe that it says Homer is combatively heterosexual.

• Engages in conversation with literary scholars throughout the essay, showing how their interpretation affirms, contrasts, contradicts and resolves the interpretive problem posed by literary scholars.
• Uses contextual and argumentative sources to support and challenge their analysis of the text.
• Uses close reading strategies to deeply analyze the literary text.
• Resolves the interpretive problem through a deep analysis of the text.

Conclusion:

• Discuss the significance of their analysis to the research being done on that area of literary study.
• Identify one question or problem that still remains for the field of scholarship on the subject.

Sample Researched Argument

The White Gaze in “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Paragraph 1

Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa, captured at a young age, and sold into slavery. Despite the violent history that she lives through, her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” opens by expressing gratitude towards a system only referred to in the poem as “mercy.” Due to this discrepancy between the violent history she lives through and the evangelical understanding of that history expressed in the poem, critics have long questioned whether her poetry is a true expression of herself. No one tells the story of Wheatley’s legacy better than Henry Louis Gates, Jr. who, in his article “Phillis Wheatley on Trial,” describes how the Black Nationalist movement zeroed in on “On Being Brought from Africa to America” because there was no outcry in the poem—no objection to being brought to America. The poem was absent of the longing to return back to Africa that the Black Nationalist movement invested in (Gates 87). These critics also decried her poetic style, which imitated White, Enlightenment poets like Alexander Pope (Baraka, Barnum, and Thurman, as cited in Gates 87). Despite this backlash to Wheatley’s poetry, the authenticity of her work remains hotly debated today. Debates over her poetry were revived in the 80’s/90’s when scholars like William J. Scheik, Sondra O’Neale, James Levernier, and Mark Edelman Boren began to document how the biblical allusions and metaphors of her poetry, when read closely, were more subversive than appeared on first glance. This is how Wheatley has continued to be read today, with scholars questioning to what extent her subversions were explicit enough to change the cultural landscape of eighteenth-century America.

Paragraph 2

This paper will argue that the binary readings of Wheatley presented—one in which she is an “Uncle Tom figure” (Gross, as cited in Gates 87) and another in which she is a subversive, revolutionary poet (Levernier)—are both self-consciously represented by Wheatley in the poem. The poem is an example of early discussions of Black identity formation, one in which she is locked into two modes of being: gratitude and resistance. We will start by looking at the most contentious aspects of the poem—the gratitude for Christianity. Looking at the rhetorical construction of the speaker/reader relationship, we will uncover how the poem imagines her White, Christian reader and, in turn, how that White, Christian reader imagines her subjectivity. Following, we will then look at the allusions to the Transatlantic Slave Trade to affirm that these allusions demonstrate the subversiveness of her poetry. Subversive both in demonstrating the White reader’s understanding of her diasporic identity and in showcasing the fluidity of that identity in its early formation.

Paragraph 3

Arguments against reading Wheatley in a subversive light hinge on the evangelical Christian sentiments that open the first lines, particularly the idea that Africa consists of a “pagan land.” As Henry Louis Gates discusses, for Black nationalist thinkers, her description of her African origins as a “pagan” place was a rejection of her Black identity, an attempt to assimilate to her white readership. However, these opening lines are particularly interesting because of the pronoun usage in the opening lines. The opening line says, “’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,” (Wheatley 1). While on the surface the line looks like a benign Christian gratitude for salvation, the pronoun usage in these early lines suggests an alienation that Wheatley feels between herself and her African origins. She has been “brought,” perhaps we might imagine “removed” from her land. The disjunction between “me” and “my pagan land,” suggests a fundamental bifurcation of the self that begins the poem. In many accounts of Wheatley’s Black identity, she is conceived to be assimilationist because her poem suggests, “ludicrous [departure] from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits,” (Baraka, as cited in Gates 87). But, I want to suggest that the bifurcation of the self that begins the poem, which initially may look like an assimilationist rejection of Africa—is actually a meditation on how the transatlantic slave trade has shaped her identity—an early example of Du Bois’s “double consciousness” of African-American identities.

Paragraph 4

As many scholars have noted, the poem seems to subversively contend with her relationship with evangelical Christianity, which we may note was a condition of her education. The reference to “mercy” in the first line is particularly troubling—as we know that it was not mercy, but the transatlantic slave trade that brought her to the U.S. How are we to read this reference to mercy? Are we to read it as a moment of cognitive dissonance between Wheatley’s understanding of her history and herself? Are we to read it as an imitation of forms of poetry that she was reading as part of her education? I suggest that we read it as ironic. In both of the interpretations mentioned above, there is a fundamental tension between the reader’s awareness and, supposedly, Wheatley’s awareness. In fact, the title page of the original publication announces that she was a “servant to John Wheatley”—the 18th century reader would have been well-aware of the implications of this position of servitude, would have been aware of the conditions of life that brought Africans to the U.S. Rather than looking at this line for absence of reference to the transatlantic slave trade, I think we should attend to the passivity of the line—the lack of agency she expresses in this opening of the poem. The passive construction of the sentence gives agency to mercy rather than any singular person for the double-consciousness that she is expressing in the rest of the line. It is because of this passivity that she is able to call the land “pagan,” the italicization of which suggests irony. In fact, Mark Edelman Boren suggests that stress is being put on the term pagan in order to undercut the conventional association between the idea of Africa as a pagan landscape and the Africa that Wheatley comes from (45). In this opening line, Wheatley seems to be undercutting the conventional notions that the reader might have of African poets—undercutting the idea that they are grateful for the violence being inflicted on them.

Paragraph 5

This passive construction continues to influence Wheatley’s perception of herself in the next line of the poem: “Taught my benighted soul to understand” (2). Based on the claims I’ve made in the previous paragraphs, we can trust that Wheatley has already unmoored the reader’s associations between both: the evangelical conception that the transatlantic slave trade was founded on benevolence and the association between Africa and paganism. The poem continues to make her identity the focus of the poem. In this line, she is now thinking about her “benighted soul.” While we may look at the denotative definition of this line and think that it suggests that her soul was lacking of the opportunity to be saved before she was enslaved, we might also continue to look at the passive construction of this definition. Wheatley uses the term benighted because, while suggesting that she lacked the opportunity to be saved, it also suggests that the lack of opportunity was bestowed on her by another force or person. There is an external influence shaping Wheatley’s identity in the poem—perhaps, that of the reader. As James Levernier notes, despite, or because of, the reader’s awareness of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, the poem would not have been published if Wheatley expressed explicit protest of the conditions of her enslavement (174). At the same time, this passive construction as well as the irony in these opening lines suggests that Wheatley is self-consciously aware of the suppression of her ideas brought about by the presence of the reader. As she constructs the image of herself as a poet, she has to remove herself from her African origins, has to invest in the gratitude conditioned by evangelical Christianity, has to alienate herself from the consciousness of her enslaved condition.

Paragraph 6

In other words, our reading of the first two lines of the poem suggests that this poem is actually about her identity as a Black poet. In W.E.B. DuBois’s “Strivings of the Negro People,”, he describes “double-consciousness” as “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” In the first two lines of the poem, we see the measurements of White evangelical Christianity—with its expectation that an African poet is grateful for her servitude—being ironically unsettled by Wheatley. If we look at the pattern of pronouns being used throughout the poem, we can see a self-consciousness in the first half of her octave, with a consistent attention on “me…my land…my benighted soul…I…” (1, 2, 4). Then, in the second half of the poem, as Wheatley shifts from a discussion of Christianity to a more overt discussion of the perceptions of Africans, her pronouns shift as well: “Our…Their…Christians…” (5-7). While the first half of the poem may look assimilationist, the second half of the poem showcases a conscious alignment with an African race. She is, as DuBois writes “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

Paragraph 7

In the opening lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to be contesting the White reader’s idea that the Black poet, Black person, is ultimately grateful for their condition. In the second half of the poem, her task is to define the Black identity. As she tries to do so, she realizes that she is limited by the terms given to her by the White Christian establishment. In the final lines of the poem, she writes, “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train” (7-8). It is here that we get our first references to the transatlantic slave trade, if we choose to read them that way. The final line describes the condition of reformed Black Christians as “refin’d” an oddly classed word to use if we perceive that line as depicting the conversion of Christians (8). However, the word would also have been used as a reference to the process of ‘refining sugar,’ a process by which manufacturers remove impurities and color from the unprocessed cane. Given its most popular usage in the eighteenth century, I suspect that the eighteenth century reader would have associated the word “refined” with sugar manufacturing (“Refine, V.”). Levernier also notes that these words had already taken on the association with these industries in Quaker circles—that is, circles that sought to abolish slavery it the Americas (182). Upon further looking at the language of the last two lines, we may also see the simile “black as Cain” as contributing to our imagination that she is referring to sugar (7). While she is making a biblical allusion to the more violent of Cain and Abel, the homophone also makes the allusion to sugar cane, which is black in nature. By looking carefully at the language she is using, we can see that her description of the religious system of conversion is also an allusion to the process of refining sugar. As White Christians take indigenous people and convert them to Christianity, so too do enslaved Africans farm black cane and refine it into white sugar. In these final lines of the poem, Wheatley seems to acknowledge that the language of Christianity can’t escape the slave trade. As a poet and author, neither can she.

Paragraph 8

As Wheatley tries to define and articulate a Black identity, she finds herself limited by the language of the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, we can read her poem as an articulation of the ways Black identity becomes founded on the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. While the reference to the sugar refinement process is her most referenced subversive metaphor, she also refers to her Black-ness as a “die” and the race itself as “sable.” In other words, when Wheatley constructs race, she does it under the metaphors of the valuable industrial trades: either a dye used for clothing or a valuable fur. We can read these metaphors in two complementary respects. First, the metaphors are skin-based, suggesting that this early social construction of race is partially based on skin color. Second, the metaphors are both references to a violent process enacted on an object that is then likened to violence being perpetuated on the bodies of African slaves—either through the burning of skin as a result of the dying process or the skinning of an animal. As Gates notes, Seymour Gross has said that Wheatley was a “perfect Uncle Tom Figure” (87). However, this ironic use of dialogue suggests otherwise. This suggests that, while criticizing the White reader’s perception of Black writers, she also must criticize the transatlantic slave trade, for limiting her ability to articulate Black identity in the first place.

Paragraph 9

In other words, we may re-read Wheatley’s poem as an early articulation of Black diasporic identities. In Michelle Wright’s Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora , she discusses the difficulties of expressing diasporic identities in Western literature. “On one end stands the…hypercollective, essentialist identity, which provides comfort of absolutist assertions in exchange for the total annihilation of self…” she writes. “On the other end stands the hyperindividual identity…which grants a hyperindividualized self in exchange for the annihilation of ‘Blackness’ as a collective term” (2). Wheatley’s poem seems to be straddling these two identity positions—one in which her individuality as a poet, something she is praised for in the opening advertisement of her 1773 volume of poetry, is founded on a rejection of her African heritage and one in which she can be Black, but must be perceived as part of a “diabolic” or “sable” race. Looking back at my own analysis of this poem, it seems Wheatley is limited by these dual conceptions of her identity. However, I think the poem ultimately represents an act of liberation: by self-consciously examining the limitations placed on her by the transatlantic slave trade and Christianity’s role in perpetuating the ideologies of slavery, she is able to express a fundamental tenet of Black oppression—the inability to exist outside of socially constructed categories of being.

Works Cited

Boren, Mark Edelman. “A Fiery Furnace and a Sugar Train: Metaphors That Challenge the

Legacy of Phillis Wheatley’s ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America.’” CEA Critic ,

vol. 67, no. 1, 2004, pp. 38–56.

Du Bois, W. E. B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic, Aug. 1987,

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/ . Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. “Phillis Wheatley on Trial.” The New Yorker, 20 Jan. 2003, pp. 82-87.

Levernier, James A. “Style as Protest in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley.” Style , vol. 27, no. 2,

1993, pp. 172–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946037. Accessed 12 Aug. 2023.

“Refine, V.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, March 2024, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1053806037.

Wheatley, Phillis. “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Penguin Book of Migration 

Literature , edited by Dohra Ahmad, Penguin, 2019.

—. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral . London, A. Bell, 1773.

Wright, Michelle. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora . Duke UP, 2004.

• Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action . Louisiana State UP, 1941. ↵
• Wilder, Laura, and Joanna Wolfe. Digging into Literature. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, 222-226. ↵

Writing About Literature Copyright © by Sarah Guayante is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

Ultimate Guide to the AP English Literature and Composition Exam

Do you know how to improve your profile for college applications.

See how your profile ranks among thousands of other students using CollegeVine. Calculate your chances at your dream schools and learn what areas you need to improve right now — it only takes 3 minutes and it's 100% free.

The English Literature and Composition exam is one of the most popular AP exams among self-studiers and enrolled students alike. In 2019, a total of 380,136 students took the AP Literature exam, making it the third most favored AP exam, trailing only English Language and U.S. History in popularity. If you are interested in taking the AP Literature exam—and are taking a class or self-studying—read on for a breakdown of the test and CollegeVine’s advice for how to best prepare for it.

When is the AP Literature Exam?

2020’s AP English Literature and Composition exam day is Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 8 AM. Check out our blog 2020 AP Exam Schedule: Everything You Need to Know to learn more about this year’s AP exam dates and times. 

What Does the AP Literature Exam Cover?

The AP Literature course engages students in careful reading and critical analysis of fictional literature, leading to a deeper understanding of the ways in which writers provide both meaning and pleasure to their readers—considering structure, style, theme, and smaller-scale elements such as figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone. 

Although there is no required reading list, the College Board formerly provided a list of prospective authors in its past AP Literature course description. Regardless of which specific titles are read in preparation for the exam, students should be familiar with works from both British and American authors written from the 16th century to the present. Ten of the commonly studied works in AP Literature courses are:

• Great Expectations , Charles Dickens 
• Invisible Man , Ralph Ellison
• Beloved , Toni Morrison 
• King Lear , William Shakespeare 
• Heart of Darkness , Joseph Conrad 
• The Portrait of a Lady , Henry James 
• Wuthering Heights , Emily Bronte 
• Their Eyes Were Watching God , Zora Neale Hurston 
• To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee 
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , James Joyce 

How Long is the AP Literature Exam? What is the Format?

The AP Literature exam is one of the longer AP exams, clocking in at 3 hours. It is comprised of two sections. 

Section 1: Multiple Choice

1 hour | 45 Questions | 45% of Score

The first section of the AP Literature exam is one hour long and consists of 45 multiple-choice questions—23-25 Reading questions and 20-22 Writing questions. The multiple-choice questions are grouped in five sets of questions, with each set linked to a passage of prose fiction or poetry that contains between 8 and 13 questions. Students receive two sets of questions about both prose fiction and poetry, with the fifth set varying between prose fiction and poetry. The function of the multiple choice section is to assess a student’s ability to: 

1. Understand and interpret word choice, comparisons, and figurative language

This is one of the most common questions types on the AP Lit exam. Students are frequently asked to infer the meaning of certain words and phrases, and how they impact the rest of the passage. You will also be asked to identify and interpret figurative language.

Source: The College Board

2. Understand the theme of the poem or passage

You should be able to summarize and articulate what the excerpt is about and what sort of message it conveys.

3. Paraphrase or reformulate selected lines from the passage

Students are tested on their reading comprehension by being asked to select the reformulated response that most closely aligns with the original excerpt.

4. Explain the function of…

• The narrator or speaker: Know how a narrator’s or speaker’s perspective controls the details and emphases that affect how readers experience and interpret a text.

• Characters : Grasp how characters allow the reader to explore values, beliefs, assumptions, biases, and cultural norms.

• The plot and structure : Understand what the author conveys by the arrangement of the sections of text, their relationship to each other, and sequence, along with how the reader’s interpretation of the text is affected by these choices.

• Symbols and motifs : Describe the purpose of symbols and motifs and how they contribute to the meaning of the passage.

5. Identify parts of speech, verse forms, and meters

You’ll occasionally need more technical knowledge of parts of speech (adjective, adverb, etc.) and verse forms (blank verse, free verse, sonnet, etc.). You should also have a basic knowledge of poetic meter (iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, etc).

Section 2: Free Response

2 hours 15 minutes | 3 questions | 55% of Score

The second section of the AP Literature exam is two hours (plus a 15-minute reading period) and contains three free response questions. These prompts test three core abilities:

• A literary analysis of a poem
• A literary analysis of a piece of prose fiction (this may include drama) 
• An analysis that examines a specific concept, issue, or element in a meritorious literary work selected by the student. 

The free response essays are graded by college and AP Lit teachers following a standardized rubric.

Below are 3 example free response questions from 2019’s AP Literature Exam: 

1. “Carefully read P. K. Page’s 1943 poem “The Landlady.” Then, in a well-organized essay, analyze the speaker’s complex portrayal of the landlady. You may wish to consider such elements as imagery, selection of detail, and tone.”

2. “Carefully read the following excerpt from William Dean Howells’ novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Then, in a well-constructed essay, analyze how the author portrays the complex experience of two sisters, Penelope and Irene, within their family and society.  You may wish to consider such literary elements as style, tone, and selection of detail.”

AP Literature Exam Score Distribution, Average Score, and Passing Rate

The AP Literature exam is extremely challenging, with less than half (49.7%) of students achieving a passing score of 3 or higher. The average student score is 2.62—only Physics (2.51) and Human Geography (2.55) have lower average scores. If you’re curious about other score distributions, see our post Easiest and Hardest AP Exams .

Best Ways to Study for the AP Literature Exam

One of the first steps you should take when preparing for the AP Literature exam is to look at its full course description . This will help guide your studying and understanding of the knowledge required for the AP Literature exam. Below are a few more steps you can take to ace the AP Literature exam. 

Step 1: Assess Your Skills

Practice Questions and Tests: Take a practice test to assess your initial knowledge. The College Board’s AP English Literature Course and Exam Description offers some sample multiple-choice questions, and the College Board also provides six sample AP Lit free-response questions with scoring commentaries . Older versions of the AP English Literature exam are also available; you can find a copy of the 2012 AP Lit exam and the 1999 AP Lit exam . Search around the web and you’ll likely turn up even more practice exams with answers keys —some will even have explanations of the questions. You’ll also find practice tests in many of the official study guides, and some even include a diagnostic test to act as your initial assessment.

Identify Areas in Need of Improvement: Once you have taken some kind of formative assessment, score it to identify your areas of strength and areas in need of improvement. It can be helpful to have a friend (or even better, a teacher) score your free-response essays, since they are more subjective than the multiple-choice section. With an accurate formative assessment, you’ll have a better idea of where to focus your studying efforts.

Step 2: Know Your Material

In the case of the AP Literature exam, this means focusing on your reading and writing skills.

Become an Active Reader: When reading, take care to go slowly and reread important or complex sections. Pause often to consider meaning, context, and intent. Become an active reader, underlining and taking notes as you go. Remember that the importance of the text comes not only from the author, but also from how the text affects you, the reader. Pay attention to how you feel and why you feel that way. Visit the College Board’s Reading Study Skills for more information.         

Write Frequently: Prepare for the writing section of your exam by writing frequently. According to the College Board, the goal is to become a “practiced, logical, clear, and honest” writer through the writing process. This means that you will plan, draft, review, redraft, edit, and polish your writing again and again. To be a successful writer on your exam, you will need to organize your ideas ahead of time, use your text wisely to support a clearly stated thesis, and provide a logical argument. Finally, you should pay close attention to your use of grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure. Visit the College Board’s Writing Study Skills for more information. 

Get Expert Advice: For more specific guidance about test preparation, consider using a formal study guide. One good choice is Barron’s AP English Literature and Composition, 6th Edition . This study guide contains a review of test topics covering details test takers need to know about poetry, fiction, and drama, and includes five full-length practice tests. Some users do criticize it for providing few examples of scored student essays, but plenty of those are available on the College Board scoring examples page . 

The Princeton Review’s Cracking the AP English Language & Composition Exam, 2020 Edition: Proven Techniques to Help You Score a 5 is another solid choice containing a summary of test strategies and a focused review of course content. 

Alternatively, there are many online study resources available. Some AP teachers have even published their own study guides or review sheets online. You can find one such guide here .

Consider using an app to study: A convenient way to study is to use one of the recently-developed apps for AP exams. These can be free or cost a small fee, and they provide an easy way to quiz yourself on-the-go. Make sure you read reviews before choosing one—their quality varies widely. One that does receive good reviews is the McGraw Hill 5 which also saves you some money by covering 14 different AP subjects.      

Step 3: Practice Multiple-Choice Questions

Once you have your theory down, test it out by practicing multiple-choice questions. You can find these in most study guides or through online searches. There are some available in the College Board’s course description.

Try to keep track of which concept areas are still tripping you up, and go back over this theory again. Keep in mind that the key to answering questions correctly is understanding the passage, so practice active reading skills as you’re tackling the multiple-choice questions. This includes underlining, mouthing words, and circling key points. Remember, the answer will always be found in the text, and often the question will tell you exactly where in the text to look for it.

Step 4: Practice Free-Response Essays

Focus on Writing Skills: Use a rich vocabulary, varied sentence structure, and logical progression of ideas. Make sure that your words flow easily from one to the next. According to the College Board’s scoring criteria , writing that suffers from grammatical and/or mechanical errors that interfere with communication cannot earn a the maximum score of a 6, no matter how strong your thesis, compelling your argument, or convincing your evidence is.  

Cultivate Cohesive Writing: You should also strive to write a thoughtful and persuasive analysis of the literature. Begin by writing a quick outline to structure your piece. Make sure that your introduction leads to a clearly stated thesis and use supporting paragraphs to build this argument. Use quotes judiciously in your answers and focus on writing with sophistication and clarity.

Practice, Practice, Practice: The best way to prepare for these free-response questions is through repeated exercises analyzing short prose passages and poems, and through practicing with open analytical questions. 

Understand Scoring: As you prepare for the writing portion of your exam, be sure to review how your free responses will be scored. Each free-response essay is graded on a scale from 0 to 6 with points awarded for three elements: Thesis (0-1 point), Evidence and Commentary (0-4 points), and Sophistication (0-1 point). A comprehensive explanation of the College Board’s scoring rubric is found on their website.  

Study the free-response questions and scored student responses with written explanations provided by the College Board . The most effective way to use these is to read and respond to the prompts first, then review the student samples and scoring explanations. Use this feedback to practice another prompt and repeat the cycle until you are confident that your responses are as strong as the top scorers’. 

Step 5: Take Another Practice Test

As you did at the beginning of your studying, take a practice test to see which areas you’ve improved in and which still require practice.

If you have time, repeat each of the steps above to incrementally increase your score.

Step 6: Exam Day Specifics

If you’re taking the AP course associated with this exam, your teacher will walk you through how to register. If you’re self-studying, check out CollegeVine’s How to Self-Register for AP Exams .

For information about what to bring to the exam, see CollegeVine’s What Should I Bring to My AP Exam (And What Should I Definitely Leave at Home)?

CollegeVine can’t predict how you’ll score on your AP Literature exam, but we can help take the guesswork out of college admissions. Our free chancing engine uses a data-driven algorithm taking into consideration criteria such as GPA, standardized test scores, and extracurricular activities to tell you your odds of acceptance at over 500 colleges and universities.

Check out these other Collegevine articles for more information about AP exams. 

• 2020 AP Exam Schedule
• How Long is Each AP Exam?

Want access to expert college guidance — for free? When you create your free CollegeVine account, you will find out your real admissions chances, build a best-fit school list, learn how to improve your profile, and get your questions answered by experts and peers—all for free. Sign up for your CollegeVine account today to get a boost on your college journey.

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

18.2 What is Literary Interpretation?

Defining literary interpretation.

In many ways, writing a literary interpretation will feel like the other essays you compose in this course. You will use the same close reading skills, the same kinds of critical thinking, and the same investigative approaches to ideas that interest you. Literary interpretation employs multiple modes of critical thought and writing, including summary, description, and analysis. In writing your literary interpretation essay, you will need to do the following:

Summarize : What happens in this literary work?

Describe : What are the components and details of this literary work?

Analyze : What does this literary work mean?

However, literary interpretation requires a bit more than the basic components of summary, description, and analysis. Literary interpretation requires a process of inquiry and a methodology. To make sure you interpret rather than summarize, don’t just ask “what” questions, but also ask “how” and “why” questions.

Summary asks: What happens in this literary work?

Interpretation asks: Why does it that happen?

Description asks: What are the components and details of this literary work?

Interpretation asks: How has author crafted the components and details of this literary work? Why has the author made those particular choices: in plot, images, settings, narration, characterizations, word choice, and so on?

Analysis asks: What does this literary work mean?

Interpretation asks: What does this literary work mean when analyzed through the lens of a particular methodology? For instance: How might we understand the topics of media bias and safe water rights in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People by applying a Cultural Historical, Marxist, Environmental Studies, or Presentist approach? How might a feminist theorist interpret the scenes between Desdemona and Othello compared to how a postcolonial theorist might interpret them?

Adding these sort of “why” and “how” questions—as well as adding another level of complexity to the standard “what” questions—will help you to come up with an interpretive argument rather than just a summary, description, personal response, opinion, or evaluation.

To sum up: In many ways, a literary interpretation paper will feel like the other writing assignments you complete in this course. You will use the same close reading skills, the same kinds of critical thinking, and the same investigative approaches to ideas that interest you. However, because literary interpretation focuses on an inventive work, a work of fiction, drama, poetry, or creative non-fiction, it will require special attention to how literary texts work in different ways—and set out to achieve different purposes—than the non-fiction essays addressed in other assignments. To make sure you interpret rather than summarize, don’t just ask “what happened?” but also ask “why did that happen?” or “why did that matter?”

Multiple Interpretations, Discovery, and the Importance of Your Perspective

Most works of literature are open to more than one interpretation. We have discussed the importance of reading through various interpretive lenses by applying established methodologies, but the most important perspective is yours. Ultimately, you will be the one to come up with your overall interpretive argument about the literature. Your goal from the beginning, then, is to read closely on your path to discovery. Discovery often involves looking at something from a different perspective.

To illustrate this point, consider this excerpt from the essay by scholar Walter Benjamin entitled “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting.” In this essay, Benjamin recounts how unpacking his books after having moved inspired him to look at his books differently. Once he looks at his books from a different perspective, Benjamin has a moment of discovery:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. In­stead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood—it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of an­ticipation which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-­earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less ob­scure, something more palpable than that; what I am really con­cerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of ac­quiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of mem­ories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collec­tor’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to ac­quire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. “The only exact knowledge there is,” said Anatole France, “is the knowl­edge of the date of publication and the format of books.” And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue. [1]

Note Benjamin’s theorizing about his library, even in the chaotic state that accompanies unpacking. Even to Benjamin, owner of the books, they seem different to him in these new circumstances. The same is true with interpretation. The act of interpretation asks us to pull apart a text, to think of it as disorderly parts without the connections of a narrative thread. Interpretation allows us a more arbitrary approach.

Take for instance, the main character of a novel, who may be introduced on one page, fall in love a few chapters later, and have a child closer to the end of the story. Character analysis allows you to pull these discrete elements into an essay without paying any attention to the intervening events. Just as Benjamin sees his collection as more than the sum of the individual books, so does the author of a character analysis see the protagonist as a complex, even flawed, character who represents some facet of human behavior.

If Benjamin had never written his essay, we wouldn’t think of his collection in precisely this way. Similarly, your interpretation will make a similar contribution to the existing bank of knowledge—providing insights available only from your unique perspective.

One important takeaway from this discussion is: you do not have to be an English major to write a great literary interpretation essay. In fact, when students approach the literary work through their varied majors, career goals, or personal interests, it often results in a fascinating, new perspective on the literature. For instance,

• In English 161, a Culinary Arts major wrote about the food as symbolic of the character’s cultural identities in Josefina Lopez’s play Real Women Have Curves .
• In English 162, an Engineering/Game Design major wrote about how Suzanne Collins incorporates video gaming techniques into the characterization and plot of The Hunger Games throughout the entire novel.
• In English 161, a student who was studying to take the state license exam in Real Estate interpreted Lorainne Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun through the perspective of the historical changes in his chosen profession, outlawing realtors from committing discriminatory actions such as blockbusting, redlining, and steering.

As you think about the best approach to take when reading and interpreting literature, add another question to your list. You are asking not just “What happens in this literary work?”—and also not just “why does that matter?”—but also “why does this literary work matter to me?”

The Literary Interpretation Essay

A good literary interpretation essay includes:

• A strong thesis statement that makes an interpretive argument,
• Your main points (sometimes called topic sentences or claims) that lead each paragraph or section of the essay,
• Your ample and thorough collection of relevant evidence from the literary work—including examples, passages, scenes, details, and quotations, and
• Your detailed analyses of that textual evidence, showing how the evidence relates to the main points of the interpretation as well as the overall thesis statement.

In the following sections, we will discuss these four components in the order that you will probably present them in your essay, but of course that is not the order in which they occur in the overall process of composing the essay. It’s not as though anyone begins reading a play, or writing an essay about a novel, with an interpretive thesis statement already formed. Before you get to the stage in the process where you are ready to write your interpretive thesis statement, you will probably go through an initial reading of the literary work and a second, closer reading in which you have a topic or two in mind. Your instructor may have your class read the literary work through a specific interpretive lens from the very beginning, or you may be introduced to multiple methodologies and asked to choose which one you will apply. Remember that interpretation is a journey to discovery that involves seeing things from a different perspective. However, the path that you take along the journey—the order in which you take the steps needed to write a strong interpretation essay—will depend upon your instructor’s guidance and your own sense of the process that works best for you.

[1] Quoted from “The Long(ish) Read: Walter Benjamin Unpacking His Library.” Arch Daily. https://www.archdaily.com/771939/the-long-ish-read-walter-benjamin-unpacking-his-library . Benjamin’s appeared first in German, in Literarische Welt  (1931); it was translated into English and republished in Benjamin’s Illuminations  (1999).

Continue Reading: 18.3 The Literary Interpretation Essay

Composition for Commodores Copyright © 2023 by Mollie Chambers; Karin Hooks; Donna Hunt; Kim Karshner; Josh Kesterson; Geoff Polk; Amy Scott-Douglass; Justin Sevenker; Jewon Woo; and other LCCC Faculty is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Welcome to the Purdue Online Writing Lab

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University houses writing resources and instructional material, and we provide these as a free service of the Writing Lab at Purdue. Students, members of the community, and users worldwide will find information to assist with many writing projects. Teachers and trainers may use this material for in-class and out-of-class instruction.

The Purdue On-Campus Writing Lab and Purdue Online Writing Lab assist clients in their development as writers—no matter what their skill level—with on-campus consultations, online participation, and community engagement. The Purdue Writing Lab serves the Purdue, West Lafayette, campus and coordinates with local literacy initiatives. The Purdue OWL offers global support through online reference materials and services.

A Message From the Assistant Director of Content Development 

The Purdue OWL® is committed to supporting  students, instructors, and writers by offering a wide range of resources that are developed and revised with them in mind. To do this, the OWL team is always exploring possibilties for a better design, allowing accessibility and user experience to guide our process. As the OWL undergoes some changes, we welcome your feedback and suggestions by email at any time.

Please don't hesitate to contact us via our contact page  if you have any questions or comments.

All the best,

Social Media

Facebook twitter.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

Alice McDermott’s Writing Mantra: “Ah, Fuck Em.”

From her one story literary debutante ball address.

Photo by Miria-Sabina Maciągiewicz.

As Emerson said to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”

The same words my editor said to me when I published my first novel in—good God—1982!

Although I have to confess—Emerson to Whitman aside—the sentiment struck me even then as rather hyperbolic.

It strikes me now as ill-timed. Forty years later, I’m pretty sure I’m still at the start of this career—and whether it is a great career or not remains to be determined.

This is because, as you’ve no doubt already discovered, our vocation, the writer’s life, allows us to believe that we are always at the beginning of things, since each new story we write, each new novel, each new sentence, for that matter, turns us once again into novices, freshman, lone travelers in uncharted lands, debutantes—eternally new at this, eternally attempting to tell a story that’s never been told before.

Not a bad thing. Really.

Nevertheless, this occasion, this celebration of your own debuts, calls for words of wisdom, sage counsel from a tribal elder, or at least from someone who’s been new to this job for some time now.

And so I’ve been trying to recall what advice I might have received, early on, advice that has, perhaps, helped me through these years of getting started.

And I’ve remembered this:

The National Book Awards dinner at the Pierre Hotel, 1987. My second novel was one of the five finalist that year (this was well before that insidious thing called a Long List), but so was Toni Morrison’s brilliant Beloved.

Which took the pressure off us lesser mortals—everyone knew Beloved would win.

(Although, of course, let’s face it, we wouldn’t be writers if we weren’t also dreamers, romantics… so I’ll admit I did briefly imagine a Cinderella moment when—astonishingly—my little second novel emerged as the upset winner, the dark horse. A fantasy that it took two more novels and another decade to actually occur in what’s sometimes known as “real life.”)

Anyway: at the Pierre, my husband and I were at my publisher’s table with another finalist—Larry Heinemann, who’d written a devastating novel about Vietnam, Paco ’s Story —and Larry’s wife. My editor and agent and the head of publicity were also there, but I was seated next to Roger Straus himself, one of the founders of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a larger than life literary figure—publishing aristocracy, Manhattan aristocracy—a big, handsome, silver-haired legend given to wearing ascots and to sprinkling his droll conversation with startling profanities.

The fiction award always comes last at the National Book Awards—a best picture moment—and when the announcement was made, Paco ’s Story took the prize.

Three things happened at once: the audience gasped, Larry Heinemann’s wife adorably burst into tears, and Roger Straus patted my knee like a sympathetic uncle.

As Larry made his way to the podium, Roger leaned over to whisper in my ear…

He said, “Ah, fuck ‘em.”

Twenty minutes later, as we were getting our coats, Toni Morrison took my hand and, quite pleasantly, said much the same thing.

It is a piece of sage advice, a writer’s mantra, that I have made good use of through the years and that I now pass on to you: Ah, fuck ‘em.

Use it whenever someone suggests that writing stories is not a real job.

Or when you hear that print is dead. Books are obsolete. AI will replace us all.

“Ah, fuck ‘em.”

Whisper it whenever you’re told: You can’t say that. You can’t write that. You can’t sell that.

Say it whenever someone tries to suggest that there are prohibitions to our art: that you’re not allowed to imagine yourself into certain worlds, or certain characters, or certain cultures. That you are barred from creating situations that you haven’t actually lived. That you are barred from borrowing too much from so-called “real life.”

Say it when you’re told you are too late with your fictional premise—it’s been done before. Or too early—it’s never been done before.

Say it with a laugh. Or a shrug.

Say it kindly, in the same way you might mutter, “Poor fool,” or “Oh, well,” or, like a dismissive Southern lady, “Why, bless your heart.” Or say it patiently, ruefully as the Irish might say, “God help us.”

Readers, readers of fiction especially, are wonderful, generous, necessary people, the best people, really, but they can also be, well, annoying.

So say it gently when a dear reader asks you, “Why is your story so sad?” Or “Was your story supposed to be funny?” Or, “Did you intend to put that clever pivotal detail in there or did it just happen?” Say it with only the slightest exasperation when an eager reader suggests that your work would find a wider audience if your stories were, well, less complicated.

Ah, fuck ‘em.

“Do you like cliches?” A ridiculously best-selling writer once asked me. “I love them,” he said. “People know exactly what you mean when you use a cliche. Cliched phrases. Cliched characters. They don’t have to think about it.” He told me: “You should use more cliches. Readers appreciate it.”

I thought: Ah, fuck ‘em.

At a recent Q&AI was asked how I felt about online reviews. I admit I was a little tired, it had been a long day, maybe I was somewhat cranky. I told the questioner I didn’t read such reviews—of my own work or of others—because too many of them are equivalent to someone asking me “Why aren’t you taller?”

A frowning reader tells you, “Your story wasn’t about what I thought it would be about.” A helpful reader suggests you check out a novel something like your own—in truth it will be nothing like your own—because it spawned a popular series. A worried reader says, “I listened to your book while I was preparing an eight course dinner for twenty people in a crowded kitchen and I didn’t quite get the ending. Maybe you left something out.” A taciturn reader says, “I read your story,” and then, nothing else.

You must smile. We should always be kind to readers.

But you must think, nonetheless, Ah, fuck ‘em.

A great writer, no longer with us, was in his country home, struggling to compose his umpteenth novel, when a stretch limo pulled into his driveway and out tumbled a younger writer he had championed some decade before, followed by a haze of pot smoke and then the very, very famous movie star who was about to appear in the film version of the younger writer’s current very big book. They had come to pay homage, they said, to this great writer, a writer they both adored, a writer, they lamented over drinks, whose novels were, alas unfilmable.

When the two drove away in their limo, the great writer called his agent—who told me the story—to lament that none of his multi-award winning books had been brought to the screen. What was he doing wrong? Was he so out of touch? Was his work aging badly?

His agent said, For God’s sake, go write.

What she meant, of course, was, Ah, fuck ‘em.

Say it as you begin your writing day, as you turn your back on all the people and voices that do not belong in your writing room: parents, siblings, spouses, critics—online or otherwise—opinionated friends and neighbors, the latest big book, the hottest new writer, some Tik Tok thing, the graduate school classmate who just scored a billion dollar deal with Netflix.

Leaving—as Faulkner said—no room in your workshop for anything but the authorities and truths of the human heart.

And after you’ve had your Night of the Living Dead moment, closed the door on the groping hands and the ghoulish faces of all that keeps us from confronting, unfettered, those authorities and truths—without which, Faulkner said, any story is ephemeral and doomed—look in the figurative mirror and say it to yourself.

Say it to your doubts, your hesitations, your worries about getting a real job.

Say it to your fears about writing the wrong thing: the wrong phrase, the wrong character, the wrong genre, the wrong subject or sentiment. The story that dies on the vine.

I mean, fuck those fears.

Say it to every sensible, depressing, cowardly notion that visits your swirling brain, to all the things that paralyze your freedom to write.

Same goes for your Cinderella fantasies of winning a big literary prize, as well as your Eyor-esque certainty that your work will never see the light of day.

Fuck ‘em both.

You will fail, of course you will. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll write some lousy sentences, unnecessary scenes, stories that run out of steam and novels that are not, perhaps, your best work.

It is, my friends, the occupational hazard inherent in choosing a profession—the storyteller’s profession—that keeps you, despite how many years you’ve labored at it, forever a novice, a debutante, a lone explorer setting out to define a new world.

A profession that keeps you at the beginning, just the beginning, of your great career, because there’s always a new story to write, a new sentence to compose, a voice, made of words alone, that has not yet been heard, that only you can discover.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I’ve been rereading Iris Murdoch of late—because I’m still figuring out how to do this and good writers are, finally, the best guides. (Although of course, great editors like Patrick and Hannah and Maribeth and Will help too.)

Murdoch uses a term I’ve grown very fond of: “Unselfing.”

A lovely word to hold up against our “selfie” culture. A lovely way to define what we do when we face our own writerly fears and say, Ah . . . well, you know . . .

Unselfing. In Murdoch’s world, it’s a complex concept—all the best concepts are—because Murdoch was both a philosopher and a novelist, as, I suppose, all the best writers are.

Unselfing, she contends, is the great gift of both art and nature. It is the ability to shed, if only momentarily, what she describes as our “fat, relentless ego.” It is the ability to leave the self, if only momentarily, in order to see clearly.

Great art, she says, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis (that would be writer’s job) and its enjoyment (the reader’s job) it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul.

(Great art), she says, is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream-life of the consciousness.

Coincidentally, or not, there’s an echo of Emerson in this:

The poet who shall use Nature as his hieroglyphic must have an adequate message to convey thereby.

An echo of Whitman, too: whose Song of Myself might seem the very opposite of unselfing, except when you consider: for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

So here’s the thing to remember: We who work at the literary arts are out to procure, for one another, for all of us, pure delight—delight in the independent existence of what is excellent, delight in the perfection of form. We are out to capture, through our stories, the unpossessive contemplation that frees us all from our relentless egos, releases us from the selfish obsessions that restrict our lives, that make us petty and distracted and alone.

We write in order to shed all the selfie-taking distortions of narrow-mindedness, one-sidedness, grievance, opinion, so that we can recognize, define, illustrate, the authorities and truths of the human heart that unite us, the authorities and truths that every storyteller is bound to pursue.

I know, I know. Rather hyperbolic, all that. Rather naive, too. Don’t we all just want to sell of few books, make a decent living? Maybe sign that Netflix deal?

I know, I hear it.

Despite the fact that I’ve been a novelist for over four decades now, I’ve also spent some time in the real world, and so, of course, I’ve heard it all:

All those devastatingly intelligent voices that say our culture has long outgrown any aspirational adulation of dead white men like Emerson and Whitman and Faulkner.

The cool, incisive chorus that so cogently contends that our shrinking attention spans have rendered print all but dead. Rendered complex concepts posed by philosopher novelists utterly obsolete.

I know the sound of the clamoring crowd that predicts AI will put us all out of business. Put difficult, original, delightfully unselfing storytellers out of business.

I’ve heard all the clear-eyed objections to my starry-eyed, English Major notions about the soul-stretching importance of literature.

I’ve heard these arguments, turned them over in my mind. Taken every one of them to heart. I’ve been at various times dismayed and terrified and depressed, and relieved, by the good sense they make.

On this wonderful occasion at the beginning of your great careers, I advise you to do the same: Listen carefully to all the sensible warnings about our futile, delusional, outdated pursuit. Admire the real world logic of every dire prediction that the literary arts are dead. Turn these intelligent voices over in your heart and in your mind.

And then, because there is always a new story to tell, say, Ah, fuck ‘em.

And begin again.

_______________

Meet One Story’ s 2024 Literary Debutantes here .

Alice McDermott

Previous article, next article.

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Sinaloa News

• Mexican States
• Real Estate
• Expat Crime
• Expat in mexico
• Mexico HIstory
• Food & Drink
• Advertise with us
• Letters to the Editor
• Privacy Policy

Aguascalientes News

Baja California News

Baja California Sur News

Campeche News

Chiapas News

Chihuahua News

Coahuila News

Colima News

Durango News

Estado de Mexico News

Guanajuato News

Guerrero News

Hidalgo News

Jalisco News

Michoacan News

Morelos News

Nayarit News

Nuevo León News

Oaxaca News

Puebla News

Queretaro News

Quintana Roo News

San Luis Potosí News

Sonora News

Tabasco News

Tamaulipas News

Tlaxcala News

Veracruz News

Yucatan News

Zacatecas News

• Mexico National Guard protects the transfer of medical supplies in the country
• Do you love Oysters? then save this date to attend the Oyster Fair in Celestino Gasca
• Economic benefit of more than one billion pesos estimated during Easter vacations for Mazatlan and Sinaloa
• Where do the Osuna from Mazatlan come from?

Top 7 Steps To Write a Literary Analysis Essay

Knowing how to write literary analysis is important for any literature student. Literary analysis is the method of breaking down the events in a book or novel and presenting a subjective understanding. It is important to understand the author’s mindset, followed by your take on the book.  

Consequently, the question arises:  

Do you know how to write a literary analysis?  

How do we decipher the literary devices present in the book? 

How to put forth your thoughts in the essay? 

If you have issues answering these questions, look into the next section. We will tell you the steps to write a high-quality literary analysis. Let’s begin the discussion.  

Steps To Write A Literary Analysis Essay   

Writing a literary analysis essay is no rocket science, especially if you know the right steps. That way, you can write with better clarity and authority and enhance the quality of your writing.  

Here are a few steps that you can follow to write a literary analysis essay, as per Paper Hub who help writing papers –  

Step 1: Choosing The Right Literary Work  

One of the first things that you must do is choose the right literary work after reading the assignment. This is because your whole essay depends on how well you know the job, and how you can simplify it. Otherwise, you will have issues in completing the task on time and obviously, it can get you low grades.  

Therefore, find out what work you like, and you write on page after page. That way, you can become a writer and put your analysis in the paper. Consequently, read the assignment prompt carefully to write a brilliant literary analysis paper.  

Step 2: Do Lots Of Research   

Another step you can follow is to do lots of research. It is a critical factor that can help you write better and get good grades. Therefore, you should read various articles on the subject or some journals where you can get relevant data.  

Moreover, if you plan your research properly, you can create a paper without plagiarism issues. That’s why academic experts always ask students to invest time in research to get good resources from which to write. It helps you put forward your thought process and ways to focus on finer details that play a pivotal role in the book. 

Step 3: Formulate A Thesis Statement   

In the third step, you need to make a thesis statement. It will showcase what you seek to achieve in the essay and give a direction for readers to follow. Therefore, you can apply the three C rules –  

Concise: Your thesis statement should focus on what you seek to say.  

Clear: The thesis statement should be clear. Readers shouldn’t face any ambiguity in your statement.  

Consistent: Your thesis statement should be consistent; any sign of conflict can reduce your paper’s quality. 

These three Cs can help you to build a great thesis, which you later justify in the body part. Lastly, the thesis statement doesn’t need to be a one-liner. You can even write a paragraph; just be sure what you seek to say and write it properly.  

Step 4: One Point For One Paragraph  

When you are writing the body or the analysis part, you have to be cautious. As one paragraph, you need to allocate one point. This is necessary to maintain the flow of the article and increase its readability.  

Therefore, as per the word count needed, you can segregate each paragraph and write one point for each one of them. That way, you can add your facts and figures in the essay and make it more readable. Also, it will enhance your presentation and make your literary analysis look more authentic.  

Step 5: Revise And Edit   

In the fifth step, you need to read what you have written. It is a fundamental aspect of writing a literary analysis is to see  

What do you feel about the writing? 

What more can you do with the paper? 

Are there any grammatical mistakes? 

Are all the facts written well and discussed? 

All of these questions are necessary to edit your paper properly and make it a brilliant reading experience for professors and other readers.  

Moreover, you can also read your paper out loud, where you can find out the issues in the paper. Consequently, you can correct promptly. Just an advice, you should look to edit the paper after two or three days to rectify the mistakes easily.  

Step 6: Take A Third Party Advice   

In the next step, you can ask your friends and family to read and review your paper. That way, you can get a better understanding of your paper. Furthermore, they can advise you on the changes you need to make to improve the paper and enhance its reading quality.  

Also, with technological advancement, you can give your literary analysis essay to AI. They can promptly read the paper and review its overall condition. Hence, they can recommend areas where you can improve and write high-quality articles.  

Step 7: Citations   

Lastly, it is time to add citations to the paper. It is the most potent way to reduce plagiarism in the paper. Citations are a way to acknowledge other researchers’ hard work and commitment to the subject.  

That’s why their last name and date are added at the end of the text, especially at the suffix of the fact you said. It falls under good academic conduct and teaches students about the fruits of hard labor. So, add a reference page at the end of the essay.  

The Bottom Line   

In the end, if you want to write a high-quality literary analysis, you can follow the steps mentioned above. That way, you can write with much better clarity and understanding. So, follow the steps and write a flawless analysis to get an A+ on the paper.  

Here are a few frequently asked questions –  

What is literary analysis style?  

It is the way a writer chooses to write literature.  

What are literary analysis skills?  

Understanding the stages of literature and forming strategies to write them.

The Mazatlan Post

• A girl walks her pet tiger in Guasave, Sinaloa
• Mazatlan in 2021 collected from construction permits almost 2 million pesos
• Clandestine Mega-Party closed in Puerto Vallarta amidst pandemic
• Brave men defy death in La Quebrada de Acapulco

RELATED ARTICLES MORE FROM AUTHOR

Digital assets and quantum-secure ledger (qrl), developing blockchain protocols for energy transactions, deterrence of voter fraud using blockchain.

US South Carolina

Recently viewed courses

Recently viewed.

Find Your Dream School

This site uses various technologies, as described in our Privacy Policy, for personalization, measuring website use/performance, and targeted advertising, which may include storing and sharing information about your site visit with third parties. By continuing to use this website you consent to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .

   COVID-19 Update: To help students through this crisis, The Princeton Review will continue our "Enroll with Confidence" refund policies. For full details, please click here.

• Homework Help
• Find a Tutor
• How It Works
• Pre-Med GPA Booster
• Need a test prep tutor? Call us: 888-231-7737

Kimberly M.

What do you want to work on?

About kimberly m..

Essay Writing, Literature

Bachelors in Natural Sciences from University of Alabama at Birmingham

Career Experience

I have experience in a wide variety of areas which allows me to better help students with papers regardless of the subject. I also was a homeschool instructor for 12 years.

I Love Tutoring Because

it gives me an opportunity to share my love of literature, reading, and writing with others. I have found there are many ways to help someone understand a concept. I also feel there is nothing better than that moment when you are able to not only help someone understand a concept, but perhaps instill an interest in the subject as well.

Other Interests

Cycling, Drinking Coffee, Reading, Sewing, Singing, Vintage Books

Reviews    (1,909)

English - Essay Writing - College Level

Async - English - Essay Writing - College Level

Communication - Public Speaking

English - College English

English - Literature

Want to get into a great college? Your GPA matters!

The Princeton Review now has tutors online across 40 subjects who can help you 24/7.

We GUARANTEE Better Grades.

Enrollment Advisor

1-800-2REVIEW (800-273-8439) ext. 1

1-877-LEARN-30

Mon-Fri 9AM-10PM ET

Sat-Sun 9AM-8PM ET

Student Support

1-800-2REVIEW (800-273-8439) ext. 2

Mon-Fri 9AM-9PM ET

Sat-Sun 8:30AM-5PM ET

Partnerships

• Teach or Tutor for Us

College Readiness

International

Advertising

Affiliate/Other

• Enrollment Terms & Conditions
• Accessibility
• Cigna Medical Transparency in Coverage

Register Book

Local Offices: Mon-Fri 9AM-6PM

• SAT Subject Tests

Academic Subjects

• Social Studies

Find the Right College

• College Rankings
• College Advice
• Applying to College
• Financial Aid

School & District Partnerships

• Professional Development
• Advice Articles
• Private Tutoring
• Mobile Apps
• Local Offices
• International Offices
• Work for Us
• Affiliate Program
• Partner with Us
• Advertise with Us
• International Partnerships
• Our Guarantees
• Accessibility – Canada

Privacy Policy | CA Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information | Your Opt-Out Rights | Terms of Use | Site Map

©2024 TPR Education IP Holdings, LLC. All Rights Reserved. The Princeton Review is not affiliated with Princeton University

TPR Education, LLC (doing business as “The Princeton Review”) is controlled by Primavera Holdings Limited, a firm owned by Chinese nationals with a principal place of business in Hong Kong, China.

The Brevity Blog

Essays Exploring craft and the writing life

• Blog Submission Guidelines
• Donate to Brevity
• Visit Brevity Magazine

What I Learned About Essay Writing by Reading for a Literary Magazine

May 8, 2024 § 10 Comments

By Jillian Barnet

After Under the Sun published one of my essays, the editors, Martha Highers and Nomi Isenberg, invited me to read for an upcoming issue. My first thought was that I couldn’t possibly find the time. I already struggled to cobble together minutes in my writing chair. However, Martha and Nomi had nurtured my little essay, generously sharing written responses from themselves and eight other readers. Studying their feedback helped me tremendously in the revision process, not only making that essay better, but also assisting me in successfully revising other essays. Their generosity made me want to give back. So, even though I wasn’t sure where I’d find the time, I accepted the invitation to read and comment on roughly 160 submissions over a four-month period, or about ten essays per week, without compensation.

In the spirit of continuing to give back, I’d like to share with you what I learned about writing and submitting essays by being a volunteer reader.

First, I had the opportunity to absorb essays I would not normally have read. The task reminded me of getting a CSA (community-supported agriculture) delivery. When I lived in the city, I supported a local farm by paying a membership fee and in return received a weekly basket of fresh produce. Often, this produce was not what I would normally have selected at the grocery store, but I found ways to integrate the unfamiliar items, such as kohlrabi or purple sweet potatoes, into meals—and they were delicious. The essays functioned similarly: unfamiliar topics, styles, and themes became part of my mental landscape, finding their way into my own creative process. I now push myself to read outside my usual range of topics, styles, and even genres. Adding the unfamiliar to your reading is creatively powerful.

I had the pleasure of reading some very good writing, and the honor of working closely with writers to hone their submissions. For every essay, I was able to see the comments of all the other readers and to learn over time what craft elements were most commonly discussed and important. Often, I’d go back to the essay in question and reread it with those elements in mind. Seeing successes and failures of craft in someone else’s writing, where I could be objective, made it easier to see them in my own. Here are my consequent recommendations to you (and myself) about writing essays for submission to literary magazines:

• Hunt and destroy any cliches. Cliches are the telltale sign we’re reading an inexperienced writer whose prose is not well thought out. When we encounter a cliché, our eyes glaze over and we cease to take you seriously.
• The writing should be tight and focused. Lose extra words, throat clearing, and explanations. If a passage doesn’t serve a clear purpose that supports the essay as a whole, delete it, no matter how good the writing.
• Show, don’t tell. You’ve heard this before, yet we all do it. In essay, it’s much easier to relate the internal than to write the externality of scene. Easier but far less affective. No one wants to be told the Taylor Swift concert was amazing. We want to be there. Put the reader there. Think of yourself as a film producer, the writing as instructions for exactly what the viewer experiences on screen, down to the least detail. You can cut later.
• Essay, like story needs a clear narrative arc. Something, usually the narrator, should change as a result of the action. An inciting incident leads to a journey or discovery, sometimes a crisis, and that leads to some sort of change. These elements of narrative arc don’t have to be as dramatic as they sound. Sometimes they’re quite subtle, but if there’s no arc, there’s no story, just description that reads like an unfinished journal entry.
• It helps if the subject of your essay is unusual. Readers routinely set aside pieces about loved ones dying from cancer, pet death, or grieving a parent. But give us the mysterious murder of a popular high school girl and we’re all in. Bonus points if the topic is one we’ve never seen before, like trepanation.
• There should be something at stake. As in every good story, something important should be at risk. Just because you’re writing a shorter piece doesn’t mean you can do away with the element that makes the reader care and keeps them turning the pages.
• Your essay should make a point. This is what Jeannine Ouellette calls “aboutness.” Aboutness is neither theme nor plot, but something in between. Aboutness is grounded in the stakes of the piece. Does your essay stay on the surface or have deeper meaning at its core? For more on aboutness, read Ouellette’s essay here .
• The narrator should exhibit self-awareness and/or introspection. This includes being as critical of oneself as of other characters, but goes beyond that. Self-awareness—our separateness from others and our acknowledgement of what we bring to the topic at hand—is vital for critical thinking, and critical thinking is the lifeblood of essay.

I thought reading for a literary magazine would be an altruistic chore, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. It improved my writing and editing skills and introduced me to a new segment of the writing community. In the case of Under the Sun , readers learned from one another, cheered each other’s publishing successes, and shared information about magazines where we might want to submit. Building community with other writers is part of good literary citizenship, fosters valuable connections, and creates good karma. I look forward to doing it again, perhaps for a different publication.

Next time you have a piece accepted, think about offering to be a reader. The editors will likely be thrilled, and you’ll benefit too.  ___ Jillian Barnet’s writing explores family, the fallout of closed adoption, and transplantation to a rural farming community. Her essays and poems have appeared in Best American Essays, North American Review , New Letters , Nimrod , and Image , among others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of the poetry chapbook, Falling Bodies . Links to some of her work can be found at www.jillianbarnetwrites.com . Jillian lives on a tiny farm in the Finger Lakes where she is at work on a memoir.

Share this:

Tagged: Jeannine Ouellete , literary magazines , Under the Sun

§ 10 Responses to What I Learned About Essay Writing by Reading for a Literary Magazine

So smart! In my MFA program, many of my cohorts complained about giving and receiving comments from peers, but like you, I found it was an essential element of my education.

Thank you! Yes— peers can be inciteful, and they’re also a good cheering section / support system— so necessary in this writing endeavor.

I found the primary value of reading and commenting on others’ work was in what I found in their writing both to admire and question. Further, it forced me to consider how I could usefully identify the issue for them, and how often it led me to see similar issues in my own writing.

Jillian, my two biggest takeaways from your essay in which you model everything an essay should be is 1) aboutness (a burning question I struggle with that every day in everything I read or write); and 2) what it means to be a good literary citizen, which you also model magnificently. I’m just learning how to be/become a good literary citizen and you’re right: it is so gratifying!

Margaret, thank you for your comments. I highly recommend Jeannine Ouellette’s essay on “aboutness,” if you’ve not yet read it. … Being a good literary citizen has repaid me a hundred times over, and I’ve made great writer friends through the practice.

Jillian, the essay by Jeannine O. is indeed wonderful. I’m at that stage where my debut memoir is just launched, out in the world, back flap copy written, its aboutness now in the hands of readers. And yet every time I now must summarize it in front of an audience I return to the question, what is it really about? Something fresh and new occurs to me every time. Tonight I will speak about the book in front of childhood classmates at my 55th high school reunion. What will I “tell” them, or “show” them by reading a chapter? Like putting pen to the page yet again, I will find out. It’s always a discovery, waiting for fresh eyes. Don’t you love that?

Fantastic craft essay, Jillian! Great summary of all the key elements of craft that a finished piece needs to demonstrate. I especially love your inclusion of the search for the “unusual,” which is really to emphasize that writers need to be aware of what literary magazines have already published to bring something new to the table. So many times strong essays on grief are turned down, not because they aren’t good, but because editors are looking to add something fresh to the publication.

Jillian, thank you so much for including my work with your wonderful and extremely valuable craft essay! It’s an honor.

I have recommended that essay of yours— and your excellent Substack— to so many writers! I just wish I had the time to read all your posts— you’re too prolific for me!😂

Leave a comment Cancel reply

« What You Don’t Know About Publishing (Could Ruin Your Book)

Micro Memoir Recipe Box »

What’s this?

You are currently reading What I Learned About Essay Writing by Reading for a Literary Magazine at The Brevity Blog .

• Author: Guest Blogger
• Comments: 10 Comments
• Categories: Craft , Editing & Publishing , Literary Citizenship

Blog at WordPress.com.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Rita, Anita, My Mother and Me

By Deborah Paredez

Professor Paredez is the chair of the writing program at Columbia and the author of the forthcoming “American Diva.”

Some Latina mothers teach their daughters how to spoon masa or plátano onto a corn husk or banana leaf when making tamales or pasteles.

My Latina mother taught me to love musicals.

Or, more precisely, how to worship the diva at the center of a musical, the woman pulling at the seams of its tidy romance plot, unraveling in her wake a trail of delight and mayhem. Some days it was Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice in her mink hat and muff insisting that no one rain on her parade. Or Diana Ross easing on down the road. But most times it was Rita Moreno as Anita dancing her way beyond the borders of “Ameríca” in “West Side Story.”

In the decades since its opening night on Broadway in 1957, “West Side Story” has been the story, the persistent white fantasy of “Latinness,” that Latinas like my mom and I have had to reckon with. And yet my mom and I kept watching. Perhaps it’s because, like all musicals, “West Side Story” is a complex form of representation that revels in both its messiness and its marvelousness. My mother taught me to see in “West Side Story” not just the problems of brown-face makeup, but also the choreography of another Latina who could dance her way out of any script that sought to confine her or relegate her to a supporting role. My mother was showing me a diva who could move across these imposed limits. And who did it in a fabulous dress and heels.

It is not without a measure of sheepishness that I admit this now, long after the public and private conversations Latinos have engaged in about our vexed relationship to “West Side Story.” No doubt, it presents damaging stereotypes of “Latin” culture in America. Many of us have cataloged and condemned the musical’s depictions of criminal youth and blatantly sexual women all speaking in exaggerated accents.

Musical divas like Ms. Moreno helped my mother and me forge our bond as we made our own way in America from our working-class neighborhood in San Antonio, Texas, a city that has long had a Latino majority. “West Side Story” endures as a paradoxical — and often pleasurable — cultural text by which many Latinos have come to know ourselves and one another. Artists and thinkers like Lin-Manuel Miranda , Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court and Jennifer Lopez , to name a few, have turned to the musical as a means of understanding themselves or as a jumping-off point into a new narrative.

According to my mom, the first time we watched the 1961 film adaptation of “West Side Story” together was when NBC aired it over two successive nights in March 1972. I was a little more than a year old. In those days, she and I were sharing a bed in the front room of my grandparents’ house on San Antonio’s south side. My father was fighting in Vietnam. I spent countless nights in the years that followed curled up in bed with my mother singing along to “West Side Story.”

We learned every line, every lyric. We scoffed at the brown-cake makeup. Rolled our eyes at the accents. We believed that, yes, a boy like that could kill your brother. We cried every time Bernardo died. We cursed. We crooned. We held our breaths when Anita’s purple petticoat flared, her leg kicked up and stretching to forever, to the smattering of stars above, to some beyond somewhere far from here.

In “West Side Story,” Rita Moreno doesn’t just master the notoriously exacting rigors of Jerome Robbins’s choreography. She expresses undisciplined delight in her body’s movement beyond it. In Ms. Moreno’s mauve-blurred movements as Anita there is both a sense of well-rehearsed control and improvisatory curve, a sense of what my mother would call “movidas,” of finding a way when there seems to be no way, of creating space where none is ceded. Movidas are not just ways of making do but making do with Latina flair, of hustling so smoothly it becomes dancing.

Rita-as-Anita refuses to move in a straight line — and why should she when the playing field is so full of obstacles? Latinos know there are few straightforward paths toward securing a place for ourselves; the only constant is the well-rehearsed control and improvisatory curve and sartorial flair and audacious joy we perform in our movidas. We recognize in Anita’s movements the choreographies of our own refusals and striving for self-possession.

Again and again I saw in the film how Anita tends fiercely to Maria, the teenager left in her charge. Just as I joined my mother in bed to watch and cry and sing along, Anita joins Maria on her bed to sing the duet “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love.” It’s a pivotal moment when Anita, despite her own reservations, romantic attachments and aspirations, sacrifices herself to help Maria try to achieve what she wants. Anita and Maria are the only couple central to the narrative who survive.

My mother taught me to memorize the steps and the songs in a musical diva’s repertoire. Together, we studied the ways Rita-as-Anita moves across the battered gymnasium floor, across the rooftop, across the boundaries of turf and tribe. She showed me how to follow the diva who shows Latinas how to move and move and keep on moving, how to move until the skirts of our dresses achieve lift off, how to move past the violence done to our bodies and our boyfriends, how to move closer to one another across the borders that seek to keep us apart.

Deborah Paredez is the chair of the writing program at Columbia and the author of the forthcoming critical memoir “American Diva .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .