Literature Assignment Examples

Literature Essay

It’s not a secret that writing is beneficial for every student. It helps you improve your skills and thinking abilities, enriches your vocabulary, develops your personal writing style, and practice expressing your thoughts.

But when your college professor assigns you to compose a literature essay, there are more things you can benefit from because writing about literature allows you to use your creativity. You think harder, you develop ideas, and you show your imagination.

With all those benefits, literature essay writing brings some difficulties as well: because this subject can mean a lot of things, students find it to be challenging. But don’t worry, the following tips and guidelines will teach you some helpful tricks and make the writing process easier for you.

Key Elements of a Great Essay

The first and the essential element of every literature essay is your thoughts. A paper of such type is the representation of your opinions in a very sharp and organized way. That’s why you don’t have to be shy or scared to say what you want to say and explain how you feel about the topic. Just don’t forget to back your arguments up with some good evidence.

Another important component is the thesis. It’s like a preview of your paper: it tells the reader what they can expect from your work, what issues you’re going to address, and what point you want to make.

The thesis is usually the part of the introductory section. This part is supposed to capture the reader’s attention and bring their focus to the subject, which is why you can use a small joke, an interesting quote, or a provocative question in this paragraph.

The segment where you need to develop your ideas is the body. This is the main section of the paper, and it should be divided into paragraphs, each of which should start with a topic sentence. Why is it important? Because topic sentences help you connect the details of a certain paragraph with your thesis, thus tying all the text components together.

The textual evidence is another key element you need to take into consideration. This includes other authors’ texts summaries, specific details from other works, paraphrasing, and direct quotations.

There’s one more component you should never forget about: the conclusion. This section will give your text a sense of completeness. It should contain your thesis statement written in other words, some relevant comments and opinions on the subject you have analyzed, and the summary of the major points you’ve mentioned in your paper.

What Evidence to Use

When it comes to essay writing, especially on literature-related topics, students sometimes fail to provide relevant evidence to support their words. When describing a literary piece or issue, feel free to use quotes, certain details from the given works, summaries, and paraphrase.

When talking about specific details, it’s where you can use your creativity. You are allowed to present the exact word combinations from the literary work if they are needed to prove your point.

As for the quotes, always make sure that they are suitable for the certain text part. They should explain and support your point of view, proving that this evidence in important and showing the reader why it is crucial to your argument.

The paraphrase might be used when you need to present some specific details but don’t want to quote the exact words of the author. Basically, it’s re-telling the author’s story in your own words.

List of Great Topics

Choosing an appropriate topic for your essay is the first and a very significant step. Your choice can depend on many factors: your personal interests, the field of study, the amount of information available on a certain subject, and more. But what makes it a challenge to come up with an amazing topic idea is how broad the subject of literature can be. It can include countless phenomena and take many forms.

That’s why many college students oftentimes find picking a topic to be troublesome. Here are some ideas you might use to create your best literature paper:

• The Concept of Irony in Baudelaire’s Prose Poems;
• Humor in American Literature of the 19th Century;
• Literary Symbols and How They Work;
• Your Opinion on “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway;
• Does the Author’s Gender Influence what They Write?
• Utopian Motives in the Fiction of the 18th Century;
• What Possible New Genres Might Appear in Future;
• Feminism in the Contemporary Novels;
• The Analysis of “Beyond Good and Evil” by Nietzsche;
• What Makes Poetry Witty;
• Politics and Gender in Greek Tragedies;
• The Dystopian Motives in Modern Literature and Reasons for Them;
• Ethnic Stereotypes in Burlesques and Vaudevilles;
• Japanese Utopian Literature;
• Metaphors in Emily Dickinson’s Works;
• Humor in American Literature during the Great Depression;
• The Literature Tendencies in the 21st Century;
• Ancient Satire vs. Modern Satire;
• How Will New Technologies Change the Literature?
• Contrast as a Literary Method;
• Dehumanization in Modern Literature;
• How to Become a Writer;
• Language Transformation in American Literature from 1970 to 2000.