English 10-1 · The literary essay
One point, proved from the text
An essay is not a report on a book. It is a claim you make and then prove — and the most common failure is an essay that proves nothing because it spends its length retelling.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. Building a thesis
- 3. The paragraph that scores
- 4. Conventions and correctness
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Thesis, topic and summary are three different things.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Thesis | An arguable claim the essay sets out to prove. If nobody could reasonably disagree, it is not one. |
| Topic | What you are writing about. A thesis is what you are saying about it. |
| Topic sentence | The paragraph's point, in one sentence, at the top. |
| Evidence | Specific material from the text — a short embedded quotation or a precise detail. |
| Analysis | The explanation of how the evidence supports the point. Longer than the quotation. |
| Summary | Retelling what happens. Not analysis, and not worth marks on its own. |
| Literary present | Writing about a text in the present tense: Macbeth kills Duncan. |
| Counter-argument | A reasonable objection, raised and answered. |
Building a thesis
The idea: Test it by asking whether someone could sensibly take the other side.
Compare four openings.
- “Macbeth was written by Shakespeare around 1606.” — a fact.
- “This essay will discuss ambition in Macbeth.” — an announcement.
- “Macbeth is a play about ambition.” — a topic.
- “Ambition in Macbeth becomes destructive once it is severed from conscience.” — a thesis: arguable, and it points at the evidence that would prove it.
Choosing a text. Familiarity beats prestige every time. An essay on a short story you know closely will outscore a vague essay on a famous novel you half remember.
The paragraph that scores
The idea: Point, evidence, analysis, link. Four moves, and the third is the longest.
Macbeth's language turns hollow as his ambition is satisfied. By the final act he describes life as “a walking shadow”, reducing a whole existence to something insubstantial and borrowed — a shadow has no body of its own and disappears when the light moves. The image is the opposite of the vivid, physical language he used when he still wanted the crown, and the contrast measures what the wanting cost him.
Point, evidence embedded mid-sentence, analysis twice as long as the quotation, and a link that restates the thesis in the paragraph's own terms.
The ratio. If more than a quarter of the paragraph is quotation, it has stopped being your argument.
The retelling test. Would someone who had not read the text learn what you think, or only what happens? If it is the second, it is summary.
Conventions and correctness
The idea: Correctness is assessed in its own right, and the errors that cost most are the ones a five-minute read-through catches.
| Convention | Rule |
|---|---|
| Tense | Literary present: Macbeth kills Duncan, not killed |
| Titles | Novels and plays in italics; short stories and poems in quotation marks |
| Author | Full name at first mention, surname afterwards |
| Quotations | Embedded and punctuated as part of your sentence |
| Register | Formal, but not inflated — precision beats vocabulary |
What costs marks
The idea: One of these accounts for more lost marks than the rest together.
- Retelling the plot. Summary shows what happens; analysis shows what it means.
- Dropping quotations in without explaining them.
- A thesis nobody could disagree with.
- Slipping out of the literary present halfway through.