*NOTICE: This tutorial is very in-depth. If you're looking for some quick tips, ask your teacher.*
An easy way to remember this formula is to remember GREAT:
1. Good hook
2. Relative, broad thesis
3. Evidence
4. Analyze big picture
5. Tie back to hook
Step 1: A great essay can be spotted by the few opening sentences. The hook needs to be short yet powerful, as an essay grader can usually tell within the first opening lines whether or not they're reading a good essay.
Skip the cheesy openings of "One day when I was four" or "Bam! The door to my room slammed shut," and take the more sophisticated approach. Now is a great time to break out those fantastic vocab words you've been memorizing.
Begin with an reference relative to your topic, a recent or historical event, or an explanation of a concept or item. Examples include:
John Hughes's The Breakfast Club (1985) has amassed an enormous cult-following since its creation, and deals with issues such as personal identity, teenage cliques, and family issues.
or
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East is so vastly complex and impactful that it has permeated even the American media.
Make sure you open with a topic that's very specific, including names, numbers, statistics, pronouns, allusions, or metaphors (English teachers eat metaphors for breakfast).
Step 2: Craft your thesis. This should only be one or two sentences. Reference your literary work, the author, the date the book was written, and what you're trying to prove. I learned to write this by practicing writing précis's, a French word for "precise." Write your thesis using broad terms or ideas that you will later prove in your body paragraphs.
Tabitha Gilman Tenney, in Female Quixotism (1801), dissuades her audience from reading literature without critically analyzing its content.
Notice how the verb "dissuades" is underlines. Using a vocab word of AP quality or some other strong verb makes your thesis super strong. *Do not tie your thesis back into the literary work.* Your essay is about what the author is saying to you, not about the characters. Here's what NOT to do:
Tabitha Gilman Tenney, in Female Quixotism (1801), shows (avoid this weak verb) that Dorcasina is a fool and chases men way out of her league.
Step 3: This can be the most confusing part of the essay writing process, but it doesn't have to be as long as you keep your writing concise and your organization clear. There are three mini-steps in this step:
1. Details
2. Interpret
3. No summarizing!
1. Details: If you're one of those English nerds who highlights, bookmarks, sticky-notes, and annotates in the margins, good for you! Half of your work is done already and you should consider a career in writing because you're obviously good at it. For the rest of us, it's time to open the book for the second time (the first time was when you read the first 7 chapters then decided to SparkNote that ish - for those reading Moby Dick, can I get an amen?), and frantically skim for metaphors, hyperboles, antimetaboles, allusions, allegories, similes, and every other literary device you can find that supports your thesis. For a complete list of literary devices and what they mean, go to http://literary-devices.com/.
2. Interpret: Now that you've sticky-noted all the literary techniques you've found (save time in advance by doing this as you read), it's time to interpret them. "How?" you may ask. You basically make stuff up. I'm not even lying, as long as you can back up your claims within reason, your teacher will probably give you credit. It's all a matter of opinion. You can say,
The author uses the color blue in his poem in order to invoke a sense of wonder and heavenly etherealness as a way to connect the crane operator with righteousness.
I often use words like "in order to," "to invoke a sense of," and "because" as a way to show meaning. Here is an okay place to talk about characters, events, and dialogue in the work. Talk about the characters' conversations and what they mean or imply. Write about the tone of Romeo's monologue or the imagery used to describe Cyrano de Bergerac's features.
ORGANIZATION: Do not jump around with your current topic. Devote a paragraph to each character, a certain literary device, or all the ways you can interpret an event or speech. If you're interpreting a poem, the author has already set up the organization for you; just follow what happens in the poem and write about it in the order in which it appears.
3. No summarizing: Seriously, don't. The teacher/professor/grader has already read what you're analyzing a kabillion times. If you're writing for an audience who hasn't read the work, decide to be presumptuous and assume they already have. Go back and read your essay when you're done and see if you've written something like:
And then she went into the kitchen with her butcher knife, stabbed all the mice she could find, cooked them with butter and rosemary in a pan, and served it to Snowball, her cat, who was her master.
Instead, write:
As she cooked and served her cat the mice, Mrs. Pampini's whispered of sweet-nothings to her victims, exemplifying of her insanity. She obviously has lost it because her husband Gary's verbal abuse of calling her "bitchy" and "an engorged bunny" damaged her psyche (Don't use the word "bitchy" in your essay).
Remember to include words a smart person would use. I keep www.thesaurus.com at the top of my bookmarks so I can access it quickly, and have already used it thrice when writing this tutorial.
Step 4: It's time to analyze all the evidence and interpretation. This should be your concluding paragraph. Talk about what it all means, why does it matter, why should I (the audience) care? A good standby is to give your own philosophies of life that you've thought about intensely since birth. For example:
Tenney uses alliteration, antithesis, and irony to prove how Dorcasina's life was so messed up because of her uncanny ability to blindly trust that everything she read in her novels exactly matches real life (Quick recap of your body and tie-in to your thesis). She wants to demonstrate that we must think critically about what we read, and if we don't, we will be fooled into believing the lies of authors and end up dead in a ditch in Oklahoma (Consequences and personal philosophy).
Here you can extrapolate and complete your thesis. You know you've given them the proof in your body, now slam your grader with the cold, hard truth.
Finally, Step 5: Tie back to your hook. This is a great way to circle back the the beginning and give your essay a sense of completeness. Example:
Just like Allison, Bender, Claire, Andrew and Brian became friends in The Breakfast Club, so we too can all be friends if we just believe.
Yes, relationships can be difficult and hard to understand, but like the turmoil in the Middle East, love and forgiveness brings hope for a better tomorrow.
STOP. Breathe. Check FaceBook and go make yourself a snack. Stretch or watch a popular YouTube video. Take a break because you've done it, good sir/ma'am. You've written a fantastic essay. You're so close to finishing. Now go this part is so important. GO BACK AND EDIT RIGHT NOW. Essays with grammatical errors are like that annoying friend who watches the next episode of The Walking Dead and tells you what happens: they ruin everything.
Here are some things to type into the search bar (Ctrl/command F) of your word processor: things, that, they, like, um, they're/their/there, be. Try to get rid of, change, or correct these words. They're fluff and they add nothing.
ALSO: write everything in present tense. This is what the English gods require.
ALSO: check for MLA errors. Rules can be found here: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/
ALSO: cite your sources. www.easybib.com is fantastic.
NEXTLY: read it out loud to yourself to check for fluency or awkwardness of phrases.
IN ADDITION: have someone else read it.
FOLLOWINGLY: bring it to your prof/teacher early so they can tell you what to fix. There's always something to fix.
Now you're done. Congratulations. Now rinse and repeat until you graduate from grad school with your Ph.D and an old laptop. Or until you die if you go into a teaching/journalism career. Cheers!
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