Use your personal reaction to a text as a starting place.
What did you notice the most about a novel? Which scene made you cry? What about this book made you angry? What part of this text was confusing, and why?
Any of these questions are a good place to start when you sit down to analyze a text. Use your personal reactions to a text to figure out what interests you most, because chances are, you’ll have the most to say about that topic.
Re-read the text more than once.
Re-reading is an important part of analyzing a text. Read key passages several times, underlining the words that jump out at you. Then ask yourself why you noticed those particular words: Do they form some kind of pattern? How are they related to each other? Is the author using a literary device (like metaphor, symbolism, etc.), and if so, for what purpose?
Keeping asking yourself, “So what?”
When writing an essay, you will make observations about a text, and then explain the significance of those observations. Asking yourself why each point you make matters will help you get at that significance.
For example, you might notice that an author uses a lot of repetition in a poem, repeating the same line over and over. So what? The repetition helps make that line really memorable. So what? The message gets hammered in and emphasized. So what? The poem becomes an urgent cry to motivate the reader to take action. So what? The poem has a strong political message.
Think about the theme of the text.
The theme is the main idea or message the author is trying to convey to their readers. What’s the “take away” point of this work of art? Identify the theme in a piece of writing, and then ask yourself how the author conveys that message. For example, the theme of a poem might be that love is more powerful than death; the author might communicate that message through the scenes of the ghost appearing to visit her husband.
Consider the format of the text.
Why is a text presented the way it is? For example, why is this novel narrated in first person? Why is this poem broken up into four stanzas and not three? Considering the effect of the work’s structure can help you be aware of some of the author’s choices, and the significance those choices might have.
