When you thought of becoming a high school English teacher, you probably had this vision of students sitting around, diving into deep literary discussion which they then turned into a fantastic literary analysis essay.
But the reality is some of our students are still asking the question: “What is a literary analysis essay?”. This means our job is to help them navigate the challenging world of writing those essays.
Helping Students Identify the Purpose of a Literary Analysis Essay
Our first task as high school English teachers when working with students on literary analysis essays is to help them understand that their role is to develop ideas about a text and explore the complexities of that text through their writing.
These essays are intended to help them demonstrate their critical thinking and allow them to make their own interpretations and opinions.
In AP® Literature, these literary analysis essays are called literary argument essays because students must develop an interpretation of the text and then argue their point with supporting claims and evidence from the text.
Writing an Introduction to a Literary Analysis Essay
Students need to begin with a strong introduction. A great way to get them to do this is through a mnemonic device. Ideally, students will write their introduction in the form of an inverted triangle. They will start general and end specific with their thesis.
One of my teacher friends teaches her students a mnemonic called GENBIT. Which stands for general, expand, narrow, background information, thesis. It works really well with advanced students.
At some point, I decided to shorten this to GENT. This essentially takes the additional background information out of the plan.
I noticed that even my advanced students were struggling with how to write that general sentence for the beginning. I hit jackpot when I suggested that they define the broad topic. So now we use DENT: define, expand, narrow, thesis.
Developing a Literary Analysis Thesis
Students can write a strong literary argument essay when they add layers of complexity to their thesis statements. You can read more about that in this post: How to Encourage Students to Master the AP® Lit Thesis.
Helping Students focus on Author’s Craft
Help your students realize that part of their literary analysis essay should incorporate discussion of the author’s crafts that they employ. Student writers need to not only identify how the authors are using diction, imagery, characterization and more, but to also demonstrate how those elements connect to the bigger ideas of the text.
It is sometimes helpful to give students mnemonics for this as well. For a long time, our district used CEI: Claim, Evidence Interpretation. More recently, I have been asking students to “Spill the TEA:” Topic Sentence, Evidence and Analysis. In mini lessons, I go into more depth about what this looks like and model using a text we have in common. I discuss this in more detail in my course: Unlocking Characterization: Teaching Character Complexity in High School English.
Organizing a Literary Analysis Essay
I like to have students work through a piece chronologically. The easiest way for students to do this is to have them break the text into 3-5 chunks. This helps them to create a line of reasoning by using transitions to guide the reader of the essay. Students can use phrases like “in the beginning,” “next,” and “finally” to guide the reader through their literary analysis.
Using Mnemonics for Literary Analysis Essays
If you are looking for ways to help your students develop stronger literary analysis essay, using mnemonics to help them write their introductions and body paragraphs will help them to build stronger paragraphs. As students grow in their writing and analysis skills they can start to tweak these. They will sound less and less like a formula.
If you want to learn more about these mnemonics, I include them in my course Unlocking Characterization: Teaching Character Complexity in High School English. Not only will you learn about how I include these mnemonics when talking about characterization, but it includes over a dozen ideas for teaching characterization.
Additional Resources
Encourage Students to Master the AP® Thesis
Teaching Students to Master the AP Lit FRQ
Teaching Students How to Embed Quotes Using Double Entry Journals
How to Use Sentence Frames (A Better Way to Teach)
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Online Course: Unlocking Characterization: Teaching Character Complexity in High School English
