LET'S BEGIN
WRITING A COLLEGE LEVEL LITERARY ESSAY
While there are many ways to write about literature, most assignments for college English 101 classes call for analytical papers. In these assignments, you are presenting your interpretation of a text to your reader. Your objective is to interpret the text’s meaning in order to enhance your reader’s understanding of the work. Without exception, strong papers about the meaning of a literary work are built upon a careful, close reading of the text. Careful, analytical reading should always be the first step in your writing process. The main purpose of writing an interpretive, literary essay is to explain the author’s position on the main idea of the text as a whole. You must arrive at an understanding of the text which is consistent with the evidence of the text, and present the reasoning and textual evidence that have caused you to reach that interpretation. Your job is to make the most convincing argument that you can to support your interpretation, using clear reasoning and close textual analysis of the formal elements of the text that the author has used to get his/her meaning across to the reader. Your interpretation of the author’s main idea will become the basis of your thesis statement.
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Before you start writing the actual essay, you should have a good idea of what your thesis statement is. However, it is always possible to modify it when you have completed the first draft of your essay if you discover that your interpretation changes after you start writing.
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It is always a good idea to make an outline - after you have finished reading but before you start writing - to help organize your thoughts. While developing a strong, thoughtful thesis early in your writing process should help focus your paper, outlining provides an essential tool for logically shaping that paper. A good outline helps you see—and develop—the relationships among the points in your argument and assures you that your paper flows logically and coherently. Outlining not only helps place your points in a logical order, but also helps you subordinate supporting points, weed out any irrelevant points, and decide if there are any necessary points that are missing from your argument.