Any Writers out there ( Archived) (9)

Does anybody know how to write a great literary analysis? I really need to impress my professor because he is one tough cookie

have any ideas please email me. The 3 stories I have to analyze are "The Necklace" by Guy De Maupassant; "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin; and "The Chrysanthemums" by John Steinbeck.

Yes I read them just never had to write like this before. It is NOT a summary of the stories

any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated

Check these out and see if they help:



~cooneys/tchg/lit/adv/lit.papers.html


Good luck...

thank you John it does help

I attempted to email you but you have me blocked.

What I wanted to say is that I learned in a Creative Writing class in college to make the last sentence the very thing that you want the reader to remember.

Good luck to you.

sorry about that snuggs and thank you

Literary analysis.

Hmmm. Well, for me, the thing about a short-story is its length, and thus its brevity. The effective and economical use of words is the most critical aspect of short-story writing. Each and every word must move the plot forward, but show the story rather then tell it. A short-story is often like a prose poem in a way, using words to their most effective and often multi-layered potential, creating setting, character and movement with every sentence?

Characterization? Does the character live for you? Are they truly three-dimensional, or are they subtle caricatures of human qualities, what one master referred to as a "bag of bones" (I forget who). Can you see them, what they're doing, are they sympathetic and do they have real human desires and realistic motivations for their activities. The most common mistake writers make when writing is to classify their protagonists as cardboard good and the antagonists as cardboard bad. No villain ever saw himself as such, and every hero has a weakness that is all too human.

Plot? Plot should be driven by the motivations of the main characters, shown rather than told, and in short stories some sort of epiphany or change or shift in consciousness and understanding of the world should customarily occur for the main characters as a result of the plots movement toward the end.

Literary analysis is like judging a book by its words and not its cover. Things should be multi-layered in your analysis, as much or more so than the work itself. I find criticism to be much easier than the actual work itself, though, coming from both sides of the process, so I might be slightly biased toward the extremely difficult nature of crafting a good story. Writers work, and they work hard, to create a successful story.

Good luck.

Yes they do work hard and so far I have gotten a lot of information that i have sorted through and am working out my first draft

thanks for your help it really has been useful

The Necklace

I can give you a comprehensive one for that.

I did the same for my high school.. if you still got the requirement, drop me a mail and I will dig through my old books and see if I can find it for you.

I am sure it's around somewhere buried deep under old forgotten books in the basement.