Plan an Effective Structure

One common misconception students entertain when they approach literary analysis essays is the idea that the structure of the essay should follow the structure of the literary work. The events of short stories, novels, and plays are often related chronologically (in the order the fictional events happened), but it can be awkward to write a literary analysis using the story’s chronology as a basic structure for your own essay. Often, this approach leads to an essay that simply summarizes the literary work. Since a literary analysis paper should avoid summary for summary’s sake, the writer should avoid an essay structure that results in that pattern: And then Brett goes to San Sebastian with Robert Cohn, and then she returns in time to meet her fiancé Mike Campbell, and then…

If chronology is not the primary structural factor in setting up your paper, then what is? Consider the following hints in planning your paper’s structure:

1. What are your major points? What exactly do you want to say about the literary work? These should form the major organizing components of your essay.
2. What order will  most effectively lead the reader to your perspective on the subject? How can you best orient and draw the reader in with your introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion? What final point in the essay’s body will help to “clinch” the overall argument or end it “with a bang,” just before the conclusion reiterates the overarching argument in the essay’s final lines?
3. Paragraph breaks should (a) cue the reader about shifts in focus, and (b) break down ideas into small enough chunks that the reader doesn’t lose sight of the currently emphasized point. But having said that, bear in mind that in an academic essay, the paragraphs should not seem “choppy.” Instead, each should be long enough to develop its point thoroughly before shifting to the next.

You can write your essay by examining only the primary source text (the literary work itself), or you may integrate into your argument some secondary sources in the form of perspectives from other scholars, as discussed in a previous module. Regardless, your own findings from your analysis of the primary text should be the priority in your interpretation of the work. For more on this point, see the section on Literary Criticism.

Incorporate Sufficient Textual Evidence

Just as scientists provide data to support their results, literary critics must use evidence from literature in order to convince their audience that they have a cogent argument. Evidence must be provided in every body paragraph in order to support your claims. We already talked about this in the section on forming your perspective about your topic. Now it’s time to consider this in a bit more depth, as the planning stage is where you’ll select the specific textual evidence that you plan to use in your essay.

Where will you find such evidence? First, as you already know, you must do a close reading of the text. It’s much easier to first analyze and think about how the smaller literary elements work together to create the whole work, rather than randomly thumbing through a work to find support for your thesis. When you provide evidence, you are providing proof from the text that shows your audience that your thesis is valid.

Critics most commonly provide evidence by quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing a line or a passage from a work. When you provide evidence, it is imperative not to take it out of context. For example, if a character is joking with another character that he will kill himself if he fails his chemistry test, and there’s no other mention of death in the work, it would be unfair to represent this character as suicidal by eliminating the context of him joking. Accurately quoting and fairly representing events, characters, and so on adds to your credibility as a writer.

If you find evidence that counters your thesis, you should still engage with it. Think about what your critics would say, and come up with a response to show how that particular piece of evidence might still support your stance.

Once you’re done gathering evidence, you can move on to the analysis portion, in which you explain how the evidence supports your claims.

We mention this matter of evidence in relation to devising an effective structure for your essay because it’s at this point that you will want to plan how and where you will incorporate relevant textual evidence into your essay. You might want to copy specific passages from the literary work into a notebook or word processing file to keep track of them. One traditional method that has worked well for many students in literature classes is to write down passages that you intend to use as evidence onto separate index cards or sticky notes. In this form, they’re easily rearrangeable so that you can experiment with putting them in different hypothetical orders and deciding which evidence you’ll incorporate into which sections. Of course, you can easily rearrange saved passages in a word processing document, too. Some people just find that getting these things off the computer screen and physically into their hands on paper helps to increase their sense of real engagement with the words and ideas. Regardless of the practical approach you adopt, now is the time to identify and select the evidence that you’ll use to make your argument. You’ll make use of this evidence when you write your draft.

Organization

Every paper must contain an introduction (which states the argumentative thesis), subsequent argument paragraphs, and a conclusion.

Introductory Paragraph

As Janet E. Gardner writes in Writing About Literature, “Essentially, and introduction accomplishes two things. First, it gives a sense of both your topic and your approach to that topic, which is why it is common to make your thesis statement a part of the introduction. Second, an introduction compels your readers’ interest and makes them want to read on and find out what your paper has to say. Some common strategies used in effective introductions are to begin with a probing rhetorical question, a vivid description, or an intriguing quotation. Weak introductions tend to speak in generalities or in philosophical ideas that are only tangentially related to the real topic of your paper. Don’t spin your wheels: get specific and get to the point right away.” (31)

Your introduction is your opportunity to catch your reader’s attention and involve that person in the ideas you put forth in your paper. Imagine riding in an elevator with someone you’d like to strike up a conversation with about a specific topic. How do you do it? How do you catch that person’s attention before the ride is up? You can’t just immediately throw your claims and evidence at that person, yet at the same time, he or she is unlikely to be compelled by vague general statements about “the history of time” or where and when a certain person was born. And you can’t stand there all day getting to the point. Instead, you look for compelling point of interest that is both related to where you’d like to go with your discussion, and is of shared interest between you and that person. After raising the topic through this point of common ground, you can then put forth what you will claim about it.

Argument Paragraphs

As we have seen elsewhere, a complete argument paragraph consists of the following components:

1. Topic Sentence: Suggests generally what the paragraph is talking about; often includes a transition from previous paragraphs.
2. Claim: Makes a very specific claim that the paragraph will argue is true; you’ll likely derive this claim from your thesis statement (together,
   all your paragraph claims will work to prove your thesis).
3. Evidence: Provides the textual support for the claim.
4. Analysis: Explains how the evidence actually relates to the argument. This is typically the most challenging part of composing your paragraph, and it is often forgotten (much to the peril of both reader and writer!). Here, you must articulate how the passage you’ve just cited supports the paragraph claim/argument premise. You must explain how the textual evidence means what you think it means. Never rely on the reader to be able to interpret the evidence on his or her own. That is, if your argument is a statement with which the careful reader can disagree, this means that the evidence you provide can likely be interpreted in many different ways. You need to guide your reader in interpreting the evidence so as to argue why your claim is true.
5. Conclusion: Offers implications of the argument and evidence, often transitions to the next paragraph. This often answers the “so what?” question. It articulates why what you’ve just proven matters and usually articulates how your argument claims relates to/proves the thesis statement.

Verb Tenses in Body Paragraphs

Since you’re dealing with a story, novel, memoir, poem, or play whose literary world exists in its own “timeline,” it can sometimes get a little confusing when you try to determine which verb tense to use as you talk about its contents. For example, if you’re writing about Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, should you say Caesar announces or announced that he was (or is?) “constant as the northern star”? In talking about the play’s famous assassination scene, should you say the Roman senators stab or stabbed Julius Caesar?  Fortunately, there’s a general rule of thumb that can help to untangle these things: Use present tense when you refer to events that happen in the literary work itself. (The senators stab Caesar.) Also use present tense when describing the author’s handling of the work. (Shakespeare portrays Brutus as a man deeply conflicted between his love for Caesar and his loyalty to Rome.) But use past tense when referring to the author in historical context. (Shakespeare wrote his play about Julius Caesar in 1599.)

Conclusion

As Gardner puts it, “Your conclusion should give your reader something new to think about, a reason not to just forget your essay. Some writers like to use the conclusion to return to an idea, a quotation, or an image first raised in the introduction, creating a satisfying feeling of completeness and self-containment…. Some writers use the conclusion to show the implications of their claims or the connections between literature and real life. This is your chance to make a good final impression, so don’t waste it with a simple summary and restatement.” (32)

This doesn’t mean that your conclusion should not restate your thesis. Your conclusion is the place in which you draw together all the threads of your argument and neatly tie them up. When Gardner says not to “waste” your conclusion with “simple summary and restatement,” she means don’t ONLY summarize and restate. Your should absolutely recap your main points, but a good conclusion ALSO does more. Additionally, treading the path between not giving your reader anything new in the conclusion and introducing more unsupported claims can be tricky. The conclusion is a good place to SUGGEST the further implications of your argument, for life, for literature, for an author’s body of work, etc., but be careful that you don’t find yourself making new claims your reader is unlikely to agree with. These implications should follow naturally from the structure of your argument and often are best expressed with less-definitive phrasing (i.e. “perhaps,” implies,” “suggests,” “hints,” “may,” etc.).