Academic Writing Tips: Learning The Literary Analysis Essay Format

Students across the world write essays on various topics. Essay writing is one of the basic academic writing tasks students attempt from their early grades. They need to compose simple essays when in early grades, but it gets complex as they promote to higher grades. Students learn to write different types of essays including the descriptive essays, critical analysis, research papers, argumentative essays and comparison essays etc. comparison essays and informative essays are comparatively easy to write as compared to the literary analysis or argumentative essays.

If you are to write a literary analysis essay, you will need to have a critical approach and good research skills. A literary analysis essay basically is a review of a piece of literature that you choose to research upon. This will help your readers know more about that literature. It is very important that your paper is free from any subjectivity or biasness. You should review the complete work with an objective approach and highlight the strengths and weaknesses in that paper.

The format of a literary analysis essay is not much different from a traditional essay. You need to organize your data in an outline before you start the writing process. This will help you in saving time and efforts. When you have similar data organized in one place, you will save much time in tracking the information and writing them down.

A literary analysis essay needs a good topic to start. Your essay must have a good title so that you can capture reader’s attention. Make sure your topic is precise and accurate.

Officially, your essay begins with the introduction. The first sentence of the introduction needs to be very engaging so that it can hook your audience. The rest of the introduction paragraph can show what the essay is all about. You need to introduce your topic in a way that it can build interest for the audience. Give details about the literature you are going to review. Tell about its author and a brief background of the paper.

In the body of your essay, you will talk about the strengths and weakness of the paper. Mention the strengths in one paragraph or two and keep a separate paragraph for the weaknesses. You should use supporting evidence to support your major arguments in the body paragraphs.

Finally, in the conclusion, you need to summarize your entire paper.