Student Question
How should one structure an essay that explores how an author uses humor to portray something?
Quick answer:
To structure an essay on how an author uses humor, avoid mere plot summary. Focus on the author's tone and the mood created. Use specific textual examples to illustrate how humor is employed to achieve the author's purpose. This includes quoting directly or summarizing events, and explaining how these examples support your analysis. Always use evidence from the text to substantiate your points, as this is crucial for a literary analysis essay.
I won't touch on organization & structure of the essay response, as speamerfam has done a great job of describing how to do that already.
In responding to the type of essay question you describe, it's important to remember some key points:
- Don't fall into the trap of simply summarizing the plot. That's one of the most common errors in writing an essay response to a literary analysis question.
- Look at the tone the author takes toward the topic, the mood that the author's words and writing style create in the reader as he reads, and stick to the essay point of humor or whatever the instructor has identified.
- Come up with some textual examples of how the author accomplishes the purpose identified in the question. This may involve specific quotations and/or it might require that you summarize an event in your own words.
- For each example, explain how the author uses humor, etc., to accomplish the purpose. This is what instructors mean when they say "use evidence from the text to support your answer."
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