How to Prepare for a Critical Analysis Essay

To prepare a critical analysis essay you will need to be acquainted with the text under consideration. As an essay writer, you will have to judge the style of the prose and notice the change in scenes, character traits, the underlying theme, and tone. 

Close Reading a Literary Text

To begin an analysis of a text or a number of texts, you will have to decide upon your reading methods. For a shorter text, you will scrutinize each word and will probably read between the lines. For a longer text, you will have to be selective in reading the parts of the whole text. 

Identify patterns for repetition

In many of the literary works, the objects, scenes, or phrases repeat across the length of the text. Each is portrayed and presented differently and can help the reader analyze the relationship between various parts of the text.  

It’s important that you take notes and highlight repetitions while you read. These will help you keep track of various themes, scenes, and word choices; things that will come handy in the analysis.

Identify and analyze the relationship

The meaning of the words and the scenario changes along with the text. On top of that, the original meaning is hidden under various layers of words and interpretations. It is your job to extract this meaning in context to the surrounding text and analyze the relationships of each occurrence with others.

One can easily get detracted and analyze the author of the text instead of the text itself. This is a mistake that you should avoid at any cost. The author speaks through the work and what the work shows doesn’t have to define him or her. 

Some other ways to analyze the text

Working with patterns of repetition will no doubt give you insight into literary work, but it’s not the only way to analyze. Other options such as the close reading of the text can prove just as beneficial, especially by analyzing the relationship between the words and ideas by essay writer online.

Tips and Conventions

Avoid Plot Summary

When you recount the events in the text and its scenes chronologically, you end up summarizing the text. By doing so you are following the text structure put forward by the author and not your own. You should break free of creating this plot like summary by structuring the essay other than temporally e.g arranging by relationships.

 

Focus on the selected scenes irrespective of chronology. After identifying the scene for your reader you should move to analyze the details. The placement of each text should be according to its significance, starting from the most significant text to the least.

Use bloc quotation

When quoting from the text, as a rule of thumb, indent the text from the main text body if it exceeds 4 lines or more. The bloc technique gives the writer the opportunity to close-read the text and for that reason, it should be rich in text. This way the analysis will most definitely be more than the quote--the way it should be.

The argument shouldn’t be based on opinion

The essay writer free online doesn’t ask for your personal reflections or opinions when it comes to analyzing the text. The readers are not looking for a review, they are only concerned about the literary work and its internal workings. 

Focus on the speaker, not the author

The speaker is never the author, even in autobiographies. The text should be making claims about the narrator in the text instead of the author, no matter how much we think they resemble.

Write in the present tense

The literature under observation should be devoid of its historical perspective. Characters and events should only be presented in present tense. However, when you refer to historical events outside the text they should be mentioned in the past tense.