Writing A Strong Formal Literary Essay From Scratch

If you have been set the task of writing a formal literary essay then you may be wondering what you need to do in order to prepare such an academic piece of work from scratch. The following outlines various things that you might wish to consider in order to help you get the work started, as well as enabling you to complete it to a high standard.

What is a literary essay?

In order to write this kind of academic paper, will first need to know what you are doing. Essentially, a literary essay will analyse a piece of literature. It may be that you look at the piece of literature as a whole; however, you will more likely be trying to identify a particular theme, before evaluating how this theme was used in the piece of literature, and how successful its use was.

Deciding what to write about

Before you can start anything, you will first need to pick a piece of literature that you wish to use as the basis of your work. Of course, if you were assigned a piece of literature to write about when the essay was set, then you will not have to do go through this stage. However, you will most likely still need to pick a particular theme to write about.

Ideally, you will have read the piece of literature before, and made any relevant notes whilst studying the work. However, if you have yet to read the piece of literature, then it is a good idea to identify any themes whilst you’re reading the work, and make any notes that you think may be relevant. Furthermore, if the piece of literature that you are studying is famous, then you may wish to look for various writing guides that will provide a range of details and ideas relating to themes in the piece of work.

Composing the paper

You will need an introduction, in which you will introduce the reader to the piece of literature and the theme that you will be writing about. The introduction will be followed by the body section, in which you will include any necessary points that you wish to discuss in relation to the analysis of the theme from the literature that you are writing about. Finally, you will write conclusion that will finalise any evaluations that you have made. One thing to remember is that this is not a simple review, but more of a critical analysis and evaluation.