Writing about Literature

Common Approaches to Writing about Literature

Two common approaches to writing about literature, conveniently enough, correspond with two types of literature about which to write: poetry and prose. Writing about literature involves thorough preparation leading up to the act of actually typing up your paper. This lesson will emphasize the preparation process crucial to success in writing your paper.

 

Writing about Poetry

A common approach to writing about poetry is the “close reading.” A close reading is just that: reading the poem through, gaining a sense of the poem’s form, isolating words that jump out at you, and then writing about (attempting to convey the meaning you have just gleaned from the text) this “reading” you have just accomplished. So, let’s look at this process more closely.

Read the Text

As basic as it sounds, read the poem, think about the meaning, and write notes. Your notes can be about anything that immediately strikes you about the poem. In this phase, also make note of words that jump out at you. Write those words down and tuck them away for later.

Identify the Poem’s Form

It helps in this stage (depending on the poem’s length) to write the poem down, word for word. Read with rhythm in mind. The exact rhythm of the poem is not set in stone, but a working sense of the rhythm that you can arrive at for the purpose of analysis.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the rhyme scheme?
• Does it have any rhyming at all or is it blank verse?

The characteristics can get very fancy, so stick to basic, relevant issues of form that enhance your understanding of the work you are writing about.

Analyze Your Notes

Already forgot those words you wrote down in your initial reading? Well, find where you tucked them away and while you’re at it, find a good dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary would be an ideal choice and can lead to some truly amazing linguistic discoveries you never could have imagined, but really any dictionary will shed some light). It’s time to do some researching of the most basic kind: look up those words in your dictionary of choice and re-read the poem with all of these new nuggets of meaning in mind.

Analyze the Text Again

Take into consideration all of the above process—initial impressions, poetic form, meanings of words—and now re-read the poem in this new light. Make note of the imagery used, metaphors, ambiguities, and anything else relevant to your reading of the poem. Make a decision of what these things entail and begin writing about them.

Write Your Paper

Writing a “close reading” paper is not bound to a thesis or copious research. As a wise professor once told me, “It’s between you and the poem.” Try to keep it that way. You are attempting to document your process of discovering a poem’s potential meaning.

Think of it like a scientific experiment with words. You have taken in the linguistic stimuli. The words have produced the effect of meaning. You have analyzed this meaning in light of documented sources of meaning, and now you are reporting your findings. Your job in writing this paper is to guide your reader through your process of reading, analyzing, understanding, and construing a meaning out of the poem.

Structure Your Paper        

You should structure your paper—though it is not thesis-driven—with an opening paragraph introducing the concerns you will explore in the body of the paper. You will state the title and author of the poem, generally summarize the most basic details involved with the poem, and list issues of meaning that body paragraphs will explore.

The body should contain a deep analysis of the poem that documents your interpretation process. In the body, you will likely discover meanings not initially present in the opening paragraph. You will also uncover ambiguities of meaning that you will probably not solve. Then you will seal it all up with a closing paragraph touching similar ground that you covered in the opening, but acknowledging the new findings from the body.

 

Writing about Prose

Different from writing about poetry, writing about prose is generally thesis driven. Rather than attempting to give a complete account of the literature you are analyzing, you are going to harvest several observations gleaned from the reading of the text and then attempt to synthesize them into a coherent statement that you will support with the body of your paper. This is a very simple definition of a skill that one hones throughout one’s life in writing.

Thesis writing is certainly a topic worthy of fuller discussion, but to write a paper about prose, we will re-examine several steps we took in writing about poetry and then examine other steps unique to prose work.

Read the Text

Once again, you must read the prose work. Contrary to mythical accounts circulating in halls between classes, reading the work you are going to write about—and reading it well—is indispensable when writing about prose work. The goal in your initial reading of the assigned text is to engage yourself with the text. Find a way to care about it. When reading prose, try to get a sense of the bigger picture while also noticing the details that enhance or detract from the theme of the work.

In the initial reading, you probably will not catch everything, but you should get a sense of areas of the prose that you would like to explore in depth. Take as many notes as you can handle while keeping up sufficiently with the reading. Your notes should range from minor observations to little questions you have for your still-to-come deeper analysis. Do whatever you must to mark passages you would like to look at later: underline, highlight, dog-ear pages, tab pages, write down passages or page numbers, etc.

Analyze the Text

Now, after having given the prose work an initial reading, you should go back and look at all of the things that jumped out at you in your first encounter with the text. Look at everything you did to engage with the text: your notes, underlined passages, marked pages, etc. Ask yourself if any themes emerge among your observations. You may find many things are coming together, and if this is the case, you want to get picky and choose a manageable theme to explore in your paper.

Write Your Paper

When it comes time to write about the prose you have just read, analyzed, and distilled into a thesis supported by examples (analyzed ideas and textual examples), be aware of a deep pitfall at all times—plottiness.

Plottiness happens when you find that you are reproducing too much of the text you are talking about and recounting its plot points to the extent that you are not actually analyzing the literature (Armintor, 3). Simply put, plottiness is summary without insight.

When you are just starting out writing papers about literature, you may find yourself grasping with the mass of literary material put in front of you. When it is time to write the paper, sometimes you have not independently put the literary work together in your mind, and that necessary comprehension process stumbles onto the page of what is supposed to be the finished work.

The comprehension process is important, but should stay within the confines of the pre-writing stage. When it is time to write about the paper, you should already understand the basic aspects of the work you will be writing about.

Though plottiness is a glaring culprit in preventing good papers about literature from happening, you cannot, in your papers, abandon the text entirely. You want the person reading your paper to know what you are writing about. This means that you need balance.

The warnings of plottiness include text citations, summaries, and paraphrases left on their own (abandoned!) without analysis. To have good analysis, you need to analyze something. Part of your body should include text citations, brief and discreet paraphrases and summaries, all preceded and followed by your ideas—your analysis!

Structure Your Paper

Similar to the structure of the paper on poetry, you should structure your paper on prose to have an introductory paragraph that interprets the paper’s topics. However, this time you will need a thesis that all these details will culminate with, followed by a body of evidence and analysis that supports the thesis.

You should frame this body of evidence and analysis almost exclusively in your ideas, your opening paragraph with your thesis, and your closing paragraph that should restate elements of your thesis answered by the body of the paper. Your paper may possibly address unanswered questions that the thesis, followed by the supporting evidence, has opened up.

Your closing paragraph will try to tie together all the loose elements brought into play by your body’s support of the thesis. Remember: you are not giving the final word on the subject, but giving your reader a place to stop and think about what you just stated in your paper.

 

Works Cited

Armintor, M.N. Some Suggestions About How to Write English Papers. Denton: University of North Texas, 2009.

 

 

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