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Tips for writing a literary analysis

The -ure suffix means "action, process, function, result, and instrument". Thus, press is to pressure as cult is to culture, legislate is to legislature, literate is to literature, script is to scripture etc.

Therefore, if literature is there to teach literacy, then culture is merely a way to produce cults. Not so. What a waste of good parental training in saying "please" and "thank you" to have it turn into a group adulation of the latest polite celebrity. On the other hand, it is the job of culture to analyse cults so as to inform localised viewpoints about the existence of other approaches. Similarly, if people need education about pressing things, pressing things with them will likely be a slow way of educating large numbers of people. Some information, however, about the nature and effects of pressure in general, will likely get the message across or at least be a useful backgrounder for the average human bear. This would seem to turn the expression, "those who can do, do; those who can't, teach" on its head.

If your goal is to advocate for a love of literacy, therefore, being literate yourself is not going to be enough. Unless your audience is young men. (Compare Titus 2:6, 7 where young men are not "taught", merely "encouraged" and "set an example".) Proverbs 20:29 says: "The glory of young men is their strength, gray hair the splendor of the old."

Analysis can mean: "determining its essential features and their relations." Is the literature being distributed for money? Money is essentially a way of sharing societal guilt around, based on people's denigration of the unmarried hard worker archetype. Why? Because it makes sense to me. Anyway, the nature of peddling is that the original product is divided up, each part is padded back out to full size and then on-sold. This is essentially because not much would get done without the unmarried hard worker, so peddling is the next best way to make things look like "everything's fine here". So if you want my advice, the attitude of the piece of literature you're dealing with towards unmarried hard workers may determine how far it has been diluted from the original literate explanation of the topic.

As to the essential features of a piece of literature and their relations, you could try Claude Levi-Strauss's work with mythemes, start with a dictionary and define your topic words before you begin, note the style of other literary analyses you have enjoyed reading, relate parts of the literary piece metaphorically to an illustration - parts of a tree, parts of car, parts of a party etc.

Learn more about this author, Katie Savinger.
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