Answers to perpetual questions about
Writing a literary analysis essay

Writing a literary analysis is like writing any other essay in terms of strategic planning. However, three aspects of the content of the literary essay may have students scratching their heads. The three are:

• Should they summarize the work?

• Should they include the author's biography?

• How do they handle literary citations?

Although answers to these questions can be deduced from the standard strategies for thesis-and-support essays, you should explicitly describe the answers as they apply to literary analysis.

Don't leave students to fret for hours over questions you could clear up in 30 seconds; they can put that time to better use.

Summarize the work or not?

The general principle for essays is to assume your audience has general familiarity with your topic but is not as great an expert as you.

Applied to writing a literary analysis, that principle means writers do not need to summarize the work(s) they are discussing. They can assume the audience has read it/them.

An initial identification of the full title (including any subtitle) and full name of the author is adequate.

Include author bio or not?

Biographical details about the author should be included in the essay's body paragraphs only if they are relevant to the essay's thesis. The same principle holds true for information about the publication of the work.

Evidence waltz for thesis + support

In thesis-and-support writing, evidence presentation follows a three-step process, which I call the evidence waltz:

1. The writer introduces the evidence, usually including an identification of the source and the source's credentials.

2. The writer presents the evidence, usually in summary form.

3. The writer explains how the evidence supports the writer's thesis.

Waltz with literary citations

When the writer is writing a literary analysis, the presentation of evidence from that literary text has some sensible modifications of the evidence waltz strategy:

1. After the text has been identified fully once, in later references the source is abbreviated. So The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman could be called Tristram in later references and its author, Laurence Sterne, referred to as Sterne.

2. The writer quotes short portions of significant sections from the literary text in such a way that the quotation reads as part of the writer's sentences. Since the assumption is that the essay's readers have read the text, there should be no reason to quote extensively from it. A writer might, for example, quote six words of a poem as part of a sentence discussing the context of those words.

There's no rule about how much quotation is too much, but a useful guideline for a novice literary essayist might be to keep a single quotation from the literary text to at least two words but less than two sentences.

3. Most style guides require writers to include right in their text information about the exact location of quoted information, whether the writer is quoting from a 10-line poem or an 800-page book.

Insist that students provide such citations in the text of their literary analyses. The format of the citations, providing it is consistent, is less important than their presence.

In addition, a savvy writer includes information so a reader can look up a passage the writer merely summarized. For example, a writer might precede a summary by a location marker like "in the orchard scene in act II," or "Dickens begins the novel by saying," or "in chapter 19." Such location descriptors allow readers to refresh their memories.

4. As with any other piece of thesis and support writing, the analysis of how the evidence actually supports the writer's thesis is the heart of the writing.

Students who are competent at writing on nonliterary topics will have no difficulty understanding that they must show how the cited passage supports their analysis of the piece of literature. Students who lack that background will flounder.