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if you are a maintainer of this web content, please refer to the site documentation regarding web services for further assistance. This option may be re enabled by the project by placing a file with the name .htaccess with this line: to write an effective critical analysis, you must first be sure that you understand the question that has been posed, and all literary terms that you have been asked to address. Once you feel you understand the question, reread the piece of literature, making notes.

Then look at the notes you've made, consider what connections you can make between observations, and reconsider the question. Now try to select those pieces of evidence that you feel you can most convincingly use to support the claim you made. Next, try to formulate a good introduction, that names the work discussed and the author. Now proceed to introduce and discuss the evidence you mentioned in your introduction, in the order in which you mentioned it. Ensure that you deal with each kind of evidence in a paragraph of its own, and that you introduce the topic of each paragraph with a carefully focused topic sentence. Also ensure that you end each paragraph with a concluding sentence that sums up the thrust of that paragraph's argument and possibly paves the way for the next piece of evidence to be discussed. Alternatively, you can begin the next paragraph with a transitional phrase that links the new piece of evidence with the one you have just summarized.

Finally, write a conclusion that restates your thesis but using different words , incorporates a brief restatement of your key evidence, and provides a sense of closure. A good closing technique is to somehow link the claim you have made about this particular piece of literature with the author's general style or preoccupations, or to suggest some way in which the topic you have just discussed relates more generally to some aspect of human existence. What follows is the sample essay analysing the use of setting in the short story the cask of amontillado. Both good and poor examples of the essay's first and second body paragraphs are included. As you read each paragraph of the essay, beginning with its introduction, clicking on the continue arrow at the bottom of the paragraph will permit you to see commentary on particular features of the essay writing process. This handout describes some steps for planning and writing papers about fiction texts.

For information on writing about other kinds of literature, please see the writing center’s handouts on writing about drama and poetry explications. First, literary analyses or papers that offer an interpretation of a story rely on the assumption that stories must mean something. How does a story mean something? isn’t a story just an arrangement of characters and events? and if the author wanted to convey a meaning, wouldn’t he or she be much better off writing an essay just telling us what he or she meant? it’s pretty easy to see how at least some stories convey clear meanings or morals. Just think about a parable like the prodigal son or a nursery tale about crying wolf. Stories like these are reduced down to the bare elements, giving us just enough detail to lead us to their main points, and because they are relatively easy to understand and tend to stick in our memories, they’re often used in some kinds of education. But if the meanings were always as clear as they are in parables, who would really need to write a paper analyzing them? interpretations of fiction would not be interesting if the meanings of the stories were clear to everyone who reads them. Thankfully or perhaps regrettably, depending on your perspective the stories we’re asked to interpret in our classes are a good bit more complicated than most parables.

They use characters, settings, and actions to illustrate issues that have no easy resolution. In short, the stories we read in class have meanings that are arguable and complicated, and it’s our job to sort them out. It might seem that the stories do have specific meanings, and the instructor has already decided what those meanings are.

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Instructors can be pretty dazzling or mystifying with their interpretations, but that’s because they have a lot of practice with stories and have developed a sense of the kinds of things to look for. Even so, the most well informed professor rarely arrives at conclusions that someone else wouldn’t disagree with. In fact, most professors are aware that their interpretations are debatable and actually love a good argument. To say that there is no one answer is not to say that anything we decide to say about a novel or short story is valid, interesting, or valuable. So what makes a valid and interesting opinion? a good interpretation of fiction will: avoid the obvious in other words, it won’t argue a conclusion that most readers could reach on their own from a general knowledge of the story support its main points with strong evidence from the story use careful reasoning to explain how that evidence relates to the main points of the interpretation. The following steps are intended as a guide through the difficult process of writing an interpretive paper that meets these criteria.