Understanding your audience

Unless you write book reviews or essays for a campus literary magazine, the people reading your analyses of works of art and culture are most likely a professor and other students in your course. But in either situation, assume a degree of expertise among your readers. Understand, too, that people who read literary and cultural analyses on their own expect to learn something. So make good use of their time.

Clearly identify the author and works you are analyzing. It seems like common sense, but this courtesy is neglected in many academic papers because students assume that the teacher must know what I’m doing. Don’t make this mistake. Also briefly recap what happens in the works you are analyzing — especially with texts not everyone has read recently. (sum up ideas) Follow the model of good reviewers, who typically review key story elements before commenting on them. Such summaries give readers their bearings at the beginning of a paper. Here’s James Wood introducing a novel by Marilynne Robinson that he will be reviewing for the New York Times.

Gilead is set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and is narrated by a seventy-six-year-old pastor named John Ames, who has recently been told he has angina pectoris and believes he is facing imminent death. In this terminal spirit, he decides to write a long letter to his seven-year-old son, the fruit of a recent marriage to a much younger woman. This novel is that letter, set down in the easy, discontinuous form of a diary, mixing long and short entries, reminiscences, moral advice, and so on.

Define key terms. Literary analyses use many specialized and technical expressions. Your instructor will doubtless know what an epithet, peripeteia, or rondel might be, but you need to define terms like these for wider audiences —your classmates, for instance. Alternatively, you can look for more familiar synonyms.

Don’t aim to please professional critics. Are you tempted to imitate the style of serious academic theorists you’ve encountered while researching your paper? No need — your instructor probably won’t expect you to write in that way, at least not until graduate school.