A General Guide to Writing about LiteratureThis is a list of information for writing a literary essay. It is not meant to be exhaustive,but is a general guideline. For more information consultKwantlen’s Virtual WritingCentre, theOnline Writing Lab at Purdue University (OWL), and lessons from class. There are a greatnumber of online writing information sites created by Canadian Universities.Literature papers are written in MLA style. We will touch on MLA in class, and there arecomprehensive guides available onthe library website.REMEMBER YOUR READER•Your goal in writing an essay about literature should be to illuminate features of the textthat readers would not notice after reading it only once or twice.Ideally, a student whohas read the work should be able to gain a better understanding of some aspect of it afterreading your essay.•It’s not enough to simply retell a story or to describe a poem; you need to make anargument about the text.FORMAT TITLES CORRECTLY•Enclose the titles of poems, chapters, articles, essays and short stories in quotation marks,and italicize the titles of plays, movies, books and novels.•Always capitalize the first word of the title (and the sub-title, if there is one). Capitalizethe first letter of main words, except for the following:articles (a, an, & the, prepositions(in, on, at, etc.), coordinating conjunctions (and, or, for, nor, but, so, yet, as), theinfinitive to.(to walk, to run, to eat, to play, etc.)•In your introduction, don’t forget to mention the title and author of the work you will bediscussing.•Use the author’s full name the first time you refer to him or her, and thenuse only the lastname.
