Don’t Waste Time and Use These Tips on How to Write Literature Essays
What to Expect from an Essay
- Essays are comprised of the writer’s personal viewpoint. Your perspective, or “as I see it” mentality is not to be mistaken for the casual conversational tone of if, say, you would have with personal acquaintances. The writing should be maintained at a consistent tense, whether past or present, just not back or forth between the two. Language should be clear and formal, but avoid “intricately flowery” usage of words.
- The formula for an essay includes an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Though, do remember the introduction must contain a thesis statement, or the centralizing idea of the essay’s entirety. Without this, the body paragraphs will either be nonexistent, or, skewed and “all over the place,” due to the absence of a theme to further build or support your ideas upon.
Choosing and Completing Your Work
- Because the nature of the essay pertains to that of literature, you must choose a literary piece of work to write about. It should go without saying that you should choose not only literature that you have thoroughly read, but also feel you have a grasp for analyzing and dissecting. By this, honestly confront yourself with a series of questions pertaining to the literature’s summary, plot, characters, conflicts, climax, suspense, allegories, metaphors, etc. If you are having trouble obtaining any information in trying to decipher and/or understand the text that you are going to write about, try consult teachers, peers and you can even get a study group together long before the essay’s submission deadline.
- If you are unable to have the luxury in choosing which literary text to write about, or have already had a specific text assigned to you, make sure to obtain a copy of the text. This also goes for those who have a choice in choosing their text. Make certain that you obtain the text specified by the teacher by matching such characteristics as a version of the text written in a specific year, for example, but only if the teacher requests that you do, so ask!
- Once you have created a thesis statement, and are able to follow instructions, if any, you will be able to gather information from the text to support this idea. The essay hubs around your thesis, which produces your literary composition.
Follow all these guidelines and you are sure to write a stellar essay.