Teaching the Literary Analysis Essay: A Step by Step Guide

Teaching writing is hard. Teaching literary analysis is hard. Teaching our students how to write a literary analysis essay? Do we have to???

What makes the process of teaching the literary analysis essay feel like such an insurmountable challenge is that it’s really three skills in one. 

Students have to read and comprehend a short passage of text. 

Students have to identify and explain how the author used language to make meaning in that text. 

And students have to write about it, coherently and persuasively.

Because the literary analysis essay poses such a challenge, it is often reserved for our PreAP, honors, and AP English classes (whether this should be the case is a subject for another blog post). We often assume that because these are high-achieving students, they already know the basics of writing and of literary analysis, and so we toss them right in, only to discover that in doing so, we’ve left them woefully unprepared.

We certainly tried this (and failed). Sorry, class of 2008.

If you’ve spent any time with us here at Three Heads, you know we love a structured approach to, well, everything, but especially to writing. So after reading some disastrous sets of prose analysis essays in our AP Literature class, we realized that teaching the literary analysis essay would benefit from a step-by-step approach, and the more we refined it, the more successful our students became at tackling this challenging essay.

We recently polished up our materials even further for our Literary Analysis Essay unit, and we wanted to share these steps, just in case you’re staring down a literary analysis essay in your curriculum that’s making you want to run far, far away.

The Literary Analysis Essay

Step 1: Understand the Prompt

This seems obvious, right? 

We thought so. But then we watched student after student answer only part of the essay prompt, which meant their essay was doomed for the bottom half of the rubric from the very start.

Our students need to understand not only the common elements of a prompt (context, the “how,” and purpose) but how to use those elements to guide their reading and writing.

We taught our students the value of the context that is often provided in prompts: the author’s name and publication date can give us helpful clues to what the passage may be about, but many literary analysis essay prompts also provide us with a few details about the passage we’re about to read, ensuring we get off to the right start if we read carefully. 

In AP English Literature prose analysis essays (Q2), the “how” is pretty vague now that the College Board has adopted stable prompt wording: students are asked to analyze how the author “uses literary elements and techniques” to accomplish a specific purpose. 

If students aren’t writing an AP Lit prompt (or you’re using an older prompt), the prompt might tell them specific literary elements and techniques to look for, and that’s valuable information right off the bat.

Of course, the most important thing for our students to understand is the purpose. Are they supposed to argue for a theme? How someone is characterized? What tone the author has taken toward a specific subject? 

When students don’t clearly see what they’re arguing for, they often get tangled up in their reading of the passage and write an essay that may be about the text but doesn’t address the prompt.

In our unit, we used a Google Slides presentation to walk students through the process of analyzing a prompt, and then had them analyze prompts in groups before looking at the prompt that we’d be moving forward with.

Step 2: Read the Passage

Again, this seems obvious, but it can be really challenging for our students, especially if this is the first literary analysis essay they’ve been asked to write.

The biggest problem we see with literary analysis essays is that students hunt for literary devices rather than reading to understand the text and the purpose given to them in the prompt.

Our students need to know that content is king, first and foremost, but they also need to know how to read for complexity, looking for shifts in the passage or potentially contradictory ways characters or relationships are described. When they miss this complexity, it’s hard for them to write a literary analysis essay that scores on the upper half of whatever rubric we’re using.

We’ve found that when we’re first teaching students how to write a literary analysis essay, it’s helpful to give them something specific to look for, whether it’s specific details to highlight as they read or text-dependent questions to guide them through the passage.

We also discuss the passage together. Does this mean our students’ essays are often pretty similar by the end? Yes, but because we’re focused on the writing part of the literary analysis essay in this unit, we want to ensure they’re on the right track throughout the process.

Step 3: Brainstorm

Eventually, students need to make notes and outlines in a way that works for them. But not the first time we work through a prompt together. We want them to use a strategy that we know works.

After students have a firm understanding of the passage, we go back to the prompt, specifically the purpose statement. For example, several AP prose analysis prompts ask students to discuss the relationship between a character and the setting. 

At this point, we encourage our students to go back through their notes (annotations or answers to text-dependent questions), looking for adjectives they could use to describe the relationship and details that support the selection of those adjectives.

Because we frontload the assignment with our text-dependent questions, we force students to note the shifts and complexities in the passage, and we take care to point that out here: they need more than one adjective to describe the relationship (and synonyms don’t count!).

It’s only after students identify their adjectives and their quotations (the shorter the better) that we come back to the “how” in the prompt, asking students to label the quotations they identified with the correct literary element or technique (imagery, simile, a particular kind of diction, indirect characterization, etc.).

By guiding our students’ focus to the purpose first, the supporting evidence second, and only then to the literary devices, we set them up to write much stronger essays: essays in which their interpretation of the text drives the argument rather than the random simile or use of alliteration they were able to identify.

Step 4: Outline

One of the things our students struggled with most was organizing their literary analysis essay effectively. Part of this stemmed from their emphasis on literary devices rather than meaning, but for many students, writing instruction has encouraged them to organize essays by most compelling point to least compelling point (or vice versa), so it hasn’t occurred to them that when they’re discussing a specific text, it often works best to organize their essay chronologically.

After all, the author built their argument in a specific order, whether that “argument” is fiction or nonfiction, so it makes sense for us to trace the development of that argument in a similar order.

As we encouraged our students to take a “beginning-middle-end” approach to organizing their literary analysis essays, their arguments got a lot stronger. This also gave our students something to hold onto when they wrote a literary analysis essay without the scaffolds provided with their first essay: if they looked for signposts in the passage that could be considered its “beginning,” “middle,” and “end,” they often identified more complexity than if they viewed the passage as one big whole.

For our unit, our students select the three adjectives from their brainstorm they want to discuss (suggesting that they might consider choosing the adjectives they have the most evidence to support). Then we encourage them to look back at their evidence and select quotations that show, rather than tell and which focus on the most meaningful words and phrases rather than large chunks of text.

Perhaps counterintuitively, only when students have all the pieces of their argument are they ready to craft an effective thesis statement.

Step 5: Thesis Statement

Students often try to draft a thesis statement too early in the process, leaving them with an incomplete claim that they often forget to go back and revise after they’ve gone through more of the writing process.

This sets them at a huge disadvantage. Not only do we know that an effective thesis statement drives both the reader and the writer through an essay, but on the Q2 rubric for the AP Literature exam (or a comparable rubric), the thesis statement accounts for 17% of students’ overall score. That’s a significant amount!

First, we spend some time directly teaching students that an effective thesis statement must take a position on/provide an accurate, defensible interpretation in response to the prompt and may establish a line of reasoning. We go through each part of that statement in detail, addressing common pitfalls with student thesis statements.

Then we guide students through the process of using an outline to draft a thesis statement that includes (a) the adjectives they believe characterized the person, relationship, or attitude referenced in the “purpose” part of the prompt, (b) the literary devices they will discuss in their supporting evidence, and (c) a “so what,” or larger purpose the author might have had in including the text in a longer work.

At this point, we provide students with a sentence frame. While we know this is a controversial choice in an honors and AP class, we feel it’s important early on as we’re teaching students the language they will need to use in order to effectively convey their ideas.

Before we move on, we make our students double-check that they listed their adjectives and literary devices in the order they plan to discuss them in their essay, emphasizing that a thesis statement is a roadmap for the reader to follow as they move through the essay.

Step 6: Write the Draft

While it might seem silly at this point to have students write an essay when we’ve discussed so much of it in class and we know student essays will be so similar, we find this to be a helpful part of the process. We want to see if our students understand what we’ve taught them about the writing process before we worry about their ability to independently analyze a text.

The first time our students write a literary analysis essay, we provide them with a sentence-by-sentence template for their body paragraphs as well as their introduction and conclusion. For honors and AP students, we don’t provide them with sentence starters (we do for standard-level classes), but we do want to teach them what an effective line of reasoning and effective commentary look like.

However, this is not our final assessment of the skills we’ve taught in this unit. We always follow it up (whether it’s immediately or a few weeks later—essays take time to grade, after all!) with a new literary analysis essay prompt in which students must apply what they’ve learned to a new passage. Because students now know the process to follow, they can focus on developing their literary analysis skills (and we can shift our feedback focus to the development of ideas rather than the basic essentials; for those who still haven’t “got it,” we will refer them back to the first essay unit before intervening with additional writing support).

We assign literary analysis essays as timed, in-class essays. In part, this is because students must write this essay within 40 minutes on the AP Lit exam, but in an age of Google and generative artificial intelligence, we’ve also found it to be the most effective way to determine what our students actually understand of the passage on their own.

Conclusion

Providing a structured, step-by-step approach to the literary analysis essay really helped our students. With a solid understanding of what to do, they could focus on their analysis and the quality of their ideas, and as they did so, their writing got stronger over the course of the school year (the writing process is remarkably similar for the Q1 poetry essay prompt and requires few adaptations for the Q3 open prompt). They, of course, had varying degrees of success and took time to develop those skills, but giving them something to hold onto made a challenging task seem more manageable for all of us.

If your students need some help writing a strong literary analysis essay, consider checking out our Literary Analysis Essay unit! It comes with the materials (and answer keys) for all the activities described here along with a list of key literary terms to know for the analysis of prose (and a corresponding Kahoot) and three additional prose analysis prompts you can assign to your students.

Each of the three prompts is modeled after the College Board’s stable prompt wording but is not a College Board prompt, making it more challenging for your students to find ideas online. While we used the College Board’s Q2 rubric, we’ve also provided a similar adaptation for you if you like to have everything in one place.