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SOME TIPS FOR WRITING ABOUT LITERATURE
CONTENT 1. Always mention the title and author of the work(s) you are discussing early in your essay.2. Mention characters' names whenever possible; be specific about character identification. 3. Use illustrations, examples, and explanations to prove your assertions. Stick closely to the text of the work you are discussing. . Read carefully and closely. Don't hesitate to quote briefly from the primary source for illustration -- a well-chosen quote can help to illustrate your point. However, be sure to use the quote as illustration -- not as the text of your essay. 4. Clearly state the central idea or thesis of your essay in the introduction. Be sure your essay has a thesis. Do NOT state your thesis by using writer-based phrases such as: The two poems I have chosen to write about are.... Rather, focus directly on your point: The snake is a potent symbol, often invoking fear, in Western mythology. Both Emily Dickinson and D. H. Lawrence invoke that fear in their poems, but with very different results. 5. Look up the definition of any word that you are not totally familiar with. Try to find the source of and understand any literary or historical allusion that the author uses. 6. Underline key passages, even key words, in the work you are studying, particularly those passages that have reference to your thesis. Better yet, copy those passages into your notes. Be sure that any time you copy or quote form an author's work, you copy exactly -- word for word and comma for comma. 7. In an essay about literature, it is most important to try to show your understanding
of the work. Concentrate on writing a unified essay around a central thesis. Avoid going
off on tangents. Stick to your main idea, develop it, prove it, deepen it by showing
implications of your idea. WRITING CONVENTIONS 9. Double space all work, unless otherwise directed. Use a 12 point, non-italic, common font such as Times New Roman, Garamond, Courier, or Comic Sans. Center your title. Follow MLA Guidelines for essay set-up. 10. Titles of books, plays, newspapers, and magazines are italicized or underlined. Titles of poems, short stories, songs, articles, and titles that are parts of longer works are put inside "quotation marks." (EXCEPTION: the title of your own work which should be neither underlined nor quoted). 11. When you first refer to authors, use their full names; afterwards refer to them by last names. 12.
Avoid using 2nd person “you.”
In academic essays write in
the 3rd person unless the assignment calls for 1st person. 13.
Incorporate quoted material into your writing in one of 3 ways: 14.
Document poems by line number;
document plays by Act, Scene, and Line; document short stories by page number. 15.
When the quotation is followed by the
parenthetical documentation, place periods and commas after the parenthesis. If
the quote contains a question mark or exclamation point, it remains before the quotation
marks, but a period (or comma) is still placed after
the parenthesis. 16.
Use single quotation marks to quote a
quotation within a quotation. 17.
Use slashes ( / ) to indicate the end of a
line of poetry when you run the lines together in your own writing: “My young brother’s house is filled / I
go there to sing / We have not spoken of you/ but our songs are sad” (lines 13-16). 18. Use present tense verbs when writing about literature and maintain verb consistency. Papers
should be free of grammatical, mechanical, and punctuation errors: avoid comma splices,
fragments, fused sentences; make sure subject/verb and noun/pronoun agree in
number; use correct spelling; follow conventions of punctuation and
capitalization (especially apostrophes).
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