Writing about Literature
Like all university essays, the English paper requires critical thought and strong argumentation,
but its focus on language and close textual analysis makes it unique. Here are some tips that
you’ll want to keep in mind when writing about literature.
Avoid plot summary. The main purpose of an English paper is to advance an argument. As a
general rule, mention only plot details that are relevant to your argument. You may occasionally
need to contribute a small amount of additional information about the storyline to make your
analysis coherent, but keep the summary to a minimum, and leave plenty of space for your own
ideas. You can usually assume that your reader knows the narrative well.
Master the art of the analytical thesis. A good thesis is a statement of roughly one to three
sentences that says something intelligent about a literary work. It is not sufficient simply to
identify a theme in your thesis. For instance, saying that a text deals with the theme of love or
death or betrayal is not enough. (Instead, though, you might consider the ways in which love or
death or betrayal come to be understood within the text.) A thesis must be complex enough that it
would not be immediately obvious to a casual reader, but it must be simple enough that it can be
stated in a relatively short amount of space.
Here is a list of possible questions around which you might construct a solid thesis: How does
the author’s or narrator’s perspective on a given theme shift as the text develops? Are there any
apparent tensions or contradictions within the text? If so, how might they be resolved? How does
the text engage with the major political or cultural ideas of the era in which it was written? How
does the text challenge or undermine the dominant conventions of the genre in which it was
written? These are just a few suggestions. There are thousands of ways to craft a thesis, so don’t
feel limited to the questions above. Here are two examples of effective thesis statements:
By incorporating novelistic techniques—such as sustained imagery and character development—into a
non-novelistic work, Alice Munro, in her short story collection Who Do You Think You Are?,
subverts the narrative conventions of novelistic discourse.
Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” appears both to condemn and to celebrate the revolutionary impulse in
early-twentieth-century Ireland. It is neither a nationalist rallying cry nor an anti-nationalist
cautionary tale. Rather it conveys profound ambivalence toward the Easter uprising.
Let the structure of your argument determine the structure of your paper. In most cases,
you will best serve your argument by deviating from the chronology of events in the text you are
critiquing. It is fully acceptable to pluck pertinent evidence from the beginning, middle, and end
of a literary text and to use these disparate examples in the same paragraph. Sometimes you may
be asked to provide a close reading of a given literary work. Often a close reading is structured
the same way as any other English paper: you present a thesis and then defend it through detailed
analysis of the text. But occasionally, your professor might ask you to do a line-by-line or
paragraph-by-paragraph reading of a poem, passage, or story. This is one of those rare instances
in which a more sequential approach is appropriate.
Opt for analysis instead of evaluative judgments. When writing a paper, focus on analyzing
the work, not celebrating it. Instead of telling your reader that a given work is beautiful, lyrical,
or timeless, focus on the ideas the text conveys and the ways it goes about conveying them. You
may come across a line in a poem or novel that is so beautiful, or so sloppy, that you cannot
resist commenting on it. If you’re burning up to make an evaluative point, then do so. But keep it
short and sweet (or short and snarky), and don’t let it become the focus of your paragraph.
Don’t confuse the author with the speaker. Often, particularly when you are analyzing a
poem, it is tempting to assume that the author is also the narrator. This is usually not the case.
Like all university essays, the English paper requires critical thought and strong argumentation,
but its focus on language and close textual analysis makes it unique. Here are some tips that
you’ll want to keep in mind when writing about literature.
Avoid plot summary. The main purpose of an English paper is to advance an argument. As a
general rule, mention only plot details that are relevant to your argument. You may occasionally
need to contribute a small amount of additional information about the storyline to make your
analysis coherent, but keep the summary to a minimum, and leave plenty of space for your own
ideas. You can usually assume that your reader knows the narrative well.
Master the art of the analytical thesis. A good thesis is a statement of roughly one to three
sentences that says something intelligent about a literary work. It is not sufficient simply to
identify a theme in your thesis. For instance, saying that a text deals with the theme of love or
death or betrayal is not enough. (Instead, though, you might consider the ways in which love or
death or betrayal come to be understood within the text.) A thesis must be complex enough that it
would not be immediately obvious to a casual reader, but it must be simple enough that it can be
stated in a relatively short amount of space.
Here is a list of possible questions around which you might construct a solid thesis: How does
the author’s or narrator’s perspective on a given theme shift as the text develops? Are there any
apparent tensions or contradictions within the text? If so, how might they be resolved? How does
the text engage with the major political or cultural ideas of the era in which it was written? How
does the text challenge or undermine the dominant conventions of the genre in which it was
written? These are just a few suggestions. There are thousands of ways to craft a thesis, so don’t
feel limited to the questions above. Here are two examples of effective thesis statements:
By incorporating novelistic techniques—such as sustained imagery and character development—into a
non-novelistic work, Alice Munro, in her short story collection Who Do You Think You Are?,
subverts the narrative conventions of novelistic discourse.
Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” appears both to condemn and to celebrate the revolutionary impulse in
early-twentieth-century Ireland. It is neither a nationalist rallying cry nor an anti-nationalist
cautionary tale. Rather it conveys profound ambivalence toward the Easter uprising.
Let the structure of your argument determine the structure of your paper. In most cases,
you will best serve your argument by deviating from the chronology of events in the text you are
critiquing. It is fully acceptable to pluck pertinent evidence from the beginning, middle, and end
of a literary text and to use these disparate examples in the same paragraph. Sometimes you may
be asked to provide a close reading of a given literary work. Often a close reading is structured
the same way as any other English paper: you present a thesis and then defend it through detailed
analysis of the text. But occasionally, your professor might ask you to do a line-by-line or
paragraph-by-paragraph reading of a poem, passage, or story. This is one of those rare instances
in which a more sequential approach is appropriate.
Opt for analysis instead of evaluative judgments. When writing a paper, focus on analyzing
the work, not celebrating it. Instead of telling your reader that a given work is beautiful, lyrical,
or timeless, focus on the ideas the text conveys and the ways it goes about conveying them. You
may come across a line in a poem or novel that is so beautiful, or so sloppy, that you cannot
resist commenting on it. If you’re burning up to make an evaluative point, then do so. But keep it
short and sweet (or short and snarky), and don’t let it become the focus of your paragraph.
Don’t confuse the author with the speaker. Often, particularly when you are analyzing a
poem, it is tempting to assume that the author is also the narrator. This is usually not the case.
