Learning how to properly conduct a literary analysis will help you not only in your English classes, but also in many other writing situations. However, it is probably the most difficult type of writing you’ll have to do in college, as it requires of its writers to think critically and read closely and in ways they may have never before read a text.
Basic Analysis Essay Vocabulary
Here are some terms you will need to know before embarking on the analytical essay:
- Text: What it is you are analyzing. It can be a book, newspaper, magazine article, movie, etc.
- Summary: This outlines the major points of the text. Summaries provide readers with the background information necessary to understand your analysis. Summary is often incorrectly used in place of analysis for many first year college writers.
- Description: The outline of a visual text. For instance, if your text is a magazine article, you may describe advertisements, photos associated, etc.
- Critical Analysis: Determining what is good/bad, hidden/revealed, effective/ineffective about the text, then explaining why the text presents them in this way. This requires a lot of thinking, so it’s best to pre-write to try to solve the problem.
- Analysis: Explaining how and why a text does or presents something. This differs from the summary or description in that it answers the how/why question, rather than the what/where kind of questions the former addresses. Summary is for the senses; analysis is reasoning.
What to Look for While Writing an Analytical Essay
Simply stated, look for details. Everywhere. Paying close attention to details and taking notes while doing so will help tremendously when writing an analysis, especially a literary analysis or close reading.
If you have a text already that you must analyze for an essay, think about it for a second. Did you like it, or not? If not, why? Look for reasons you reacted in specific ways to parts of the text.
Pick something specific to write about. There are many things to focus on while conducting an analysis, such as:
- Words
- Tone of voice
- Structure
- Spatial Configuration (especially in the case of poetry)
- Symbols
- Images
- Themes
If you can attach onto one of these aspects from the beginning, it will be easier to hone in on the text. Once started, try to ask yourself some questions while doing your closer readings:
- Which details are significant and which aren’t? Why?
- Why does this detail mean anything? What does it mean?
- What else could it mean?
But most importantly, don’t try to say too much in the essay. You may find, once you gain some momentum, that there is too much to say about the text to fit into 5 to 7 pages, or whatever the page length assigned. Pick a specific aspect and focus on that; this isn’t a dissertation, after all.
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