Writing the Beginning Paragraph

Start your essay with a lead that gets readers' attention and orients them to the piece of literature you will analyze. After your lead sentence, you will develop a paragraph that ends with your thesis statement.

1. Name the work and author and summarize its importance.

   Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton unflinchingly portrays the deep societal divisions in 1948 South Africa, divisions that would lead to apartheid.

2. Ask a compelling question about the work.

   Why do most people consider The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald to be the quintessential "Great American Novel?"

3. Provide a powerful quotation from the author.

   “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
   —F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Share a historical reference that provides a context for the work.

   Nelson Mandela spent his youth as a political dissident, his middle age as a political prisoner, and his old age as president of a post-apartheid South Africa.

Editing for MLA Citation Style

Whenever you use ideas from others, you need to credit the source. You do so to show who originated an idea, to avoid plagiarism, and to allow readers to explore the same materials.

All credits begin with an in-text citation that names the source and page number (if there is one). The simplest in-text citation gives the source in the sentence itself.

If the sentence doesn't give readers enough information to find the correct work-cited entry, provide the last name of the author in parentheses before the end punctuation. If the source has no author, use the first significant word(s) of the title, in italics for longer works or quotation marks for shorter works.

Editing for Subject-Verb Agreement

When you write using the literary present tense, you need to make sure that subjects and verbs agree in number (singular or plural). Note these other tips for ensuring subject-verb agreement.

A singular subject needs a singular verb, and a plural subject needs a plural verb.

Two or more subjects joined by and are always plural.

When two or more subjects are joined by or or nor, the verb should agree with the last subject.

Collective nouns treated as one thing are singular; those treated as a group of individuals are plural.

When words come between the subject and verb, make sure to match the true subject.

Revising to Use Literary Present Tense

Sometimes you might struggle with the tense of verbs in a literary analysis. Do you say, "Richard Adams lived in Whitchurch, England" or "Richard Adams lives in Whitchurch, England," (when he is deceased)? Do you say "Richard Adams combined anthropomorphic fiction with naturalism" or "Richard Adams combines anthropomorphic fiction with naturalism"? And if you are in present tense for your main text, how do you handle quotations in past tense?

When you write a literature review, you should use literary present tense. This style of writing treats the piece of literature as something new and fresh whenever it is read rather than being something stuck in the past. Follow these rules to write effectively in the literary present tense:

When speaking about the work and the events in it, use the present tense.

When referring to historical events in the author's life or in the world at the time, use the past tense.

Keep the tense of quotations even if they do not match the surrounding text.

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

Start your essay with a lead that gets readers' attention and orients them to the piece of literature you will analyze. After your lead sentence, you will develop a paragraph that ends with your thesis statement.

1. Name the work and author and summarize its importance.

Watership Down by Richard Adams is a story about rabbits, but it's also about refugees and vision quests and the making of great leaders.

2. Quote a review of the literature.

“Once snared, you'll be gripped uncompromisingly by a master teller of tales. And chances are you'll not recall nobler heroes than the rabbits seeking happiness on Watership Down.”
—The Atlanta Constitution

3. Provide an engaging fact.

Humans domesticated dogs tens of thousands of years ago, when we were still hunters and gatherers.

4. Ask an interesting question.

Have you ever seen a sleeping dog snuff and snort, legs scrabbling sideways on the floor, twitching in some dream of the hunt?

Writing the Middle Paragraphs

Prewriting to Select a Work

You may already know what story or novel you want to write about. If not, answering a set of questions can give you some options:

Revising for Order of Details

When you wrote your first draft, you may have been tempted to write one paragraph about denotations, a second about connotations, a third about synonyms and antonyms, and so on. The result might feel a bit formulaic, marching doggedly through the list of details that you found. An effective essay is more than a list of details. It organizes the details with the reader's questions in mind.

In the first sample essay, "Right to the Heart," the first middle paragraph begins with the dictionary definition and then combines quotations and logical arguments to unpack the meaning of the definition. This organization works because readers know the word courage but need to analyze what it means and doesn't mean.

Prewriting to Select a Topic

The topic of your essay can be any word that fascinates you. It could be a word from a school subject or just a word that you find intriguing:

What word fascinates me most and why?

I often hear the words nerd and geek, but some people insist that they are nerds and not geeks and some that they are geeks and not nerds, and some people say they are both. I know these words used to be negatives, but a lot of people see them as positives. I'd like to know what the difference is between them and how they started to be used the way they are used now.

Note that each of these lists ends in the word symbol, which directly relates to each subject. Look back over the lists. Many of the other words in the individual lists also relate to the other subjects. For example, angle, parallel, congruent, linear, average, significant, variable, and so on relate not just to math but also to science, social studies, life, and language. The best topics for definition essays do not have one meaning but many meanings. (In other words, you could explore the word triangle or even equilateral over many pages, but you'd be hard pressed to write much about isosceles.)