How to Write About Literature Tips
Read these 6 How to Write About Literature Tips tips to make your life smarter, better, faster and wiser. Each tip is approved by our Editors and created by expert writers so great we call them Gurus. LifeTips is the place to go when you need to know about Classics tips and hundreds of other topics.
Purpose of an Introduction
The purpose of an introduction is to make your readers take notice and give a brief synopsis of what topics your paper will cover. For this reason, you may want to skip writing an introduction until you have written your topic sentence and supporting paragraphs.
Choosing a Topic
If you are asked to write a paper about a particular literary work, choose some aspect of the work that interests you to write about. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne's portrayal of the clergy in The Scarlet Letter. If you may pick your own literary work on which to write, choose one for which you have a strong positive or negetive emotional response. The more involved you are with the subject, the better your paper will be.
Purpose of a Conclusion
The purposse of a conclusion is to wrap up your paper by re-stating the arguments you have made in your supporting paragraphs. It is, in some ways, a re-structuring of the introduction. For this reason, you may want to write the introduction and conclusion after completing the topic sentence and supporting paragraphs.
Importance of Topic Sentence
The topic sentence is the most important part of your paper, and should be written before anything else. Make your topic sentence an argument persuading your audience or teacher to see the literary work as you see it. For example, "Virginia Woolf uses her novel Orlando to demonstrate how history has become a male-dominated institution."
How to Write Supporting Paragraphs
After you come up with a topic sentence, write down as many reasons as you can think of as to why you believe this sentence is true. Pick out the best reasons, and develop each one into a paragraph. These become your supporting paragraphs.
Location of Topic Sentence
A topic sentence should be located within the first paragraph of your paper, usually as the last sentence in that paragraph.
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