literature video essays

8 Video Essays About Books That Will Change Your Perspective

Emily Martin

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over at #BookSquadGoals (www.booksquadgoals.com). She can be reached at [email protected].

View All posts by Emily Martin

BookTubers are out here making so much entertaining content about books, and yes, that includes video essays. Check out these eight highly entertaining video essays. Some are from BookTubers you already love, and some might be from BookTubers who are new to you (you’re welcome). Fair warning to book lovers: these video essays will make you rethink some of your favorite works of literature. You might never look at books like Twilight , The Green Mile , or, yes, even Prince Harry’s Spare the same way ever again. But get ready to get educated and have a little fun while you’re at it.

Twilight is a Psychological Thriller, Not A Love Story

Can you believe Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight is almost 20 years old? Where is my eye cream? I am feeling very old. If you’re like me and read this book back when it first came out, it might be time to go back and revisit this text. The story is not what you think it is. In fact, Shanspeare argues that Twilight isn’t a love story at all. It’s more of a psychological thriller. Do you agree? Watch this video and think about it. Then, be sure to check out Shanspeare’s other video essays, including one of her most recent ones: The Feminine Rage Pipeline . Good stuff!

White Authors Don’t Define What’s Scary

Real talk: I think about this video essay all the time. And it’s definitely changed the way I read critiques about thrillers by authors of color. In this video essay, Jesse on YouTube discusses thrillers by BIPOC authors and how they’re received differently than thrillers by white authors. The video mostly draws examples from When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole, but Jesse also explains how this issue pertains to a lot of books by BIPOC authors and the way white people review them.

The Queer History of Loki (It’s Weirder Than You Think)

YouTuber Jessie Gender ‘s channel includes so many great video essays, mostly focusing on science fiction, fantasy, “nerd” culture, and how this medium is confronting issues of gender and sexuality. Check out this in-depth video essay Jessie did on comic book anti-hero Loki . Loki has become a queer icon, but why is the LGBTQ+ community resonating so much with this character? Watch the video to find out! This video explores Loki’s history, from Norse mythology, to his appearance in Marvel comics, to his portrayal in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The Magical Negroes of Stephen King

Princess Weekes is not the first person to point out Stephen King’s problematic depiction of BIPOC characters. But this video essay is probably the best, most thorough explanation of “the magical negro” trope and the troubling way King deploys this trope in multiple works. Disclaimer: This YouTuber wants viewers to know that she is not calling Stephen King racist, and she’s actually a huge fan of the author. This video is a great example of how you can enjoy an author’s work while still critiquing it and wanting more from the stories you read. Vampire fans, be sure to also check out her video essay Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires ?

Authors Behaving Badly Series

One of my favorite video essay series on YouTube has to be Authors Behaving Badly from Reads with Rachel . If you want to hear someone spill all of the literature tea, then you need to check out these videos. But beware: you might not be able to look at your favorite authors the same way ever again. Just take this video on Sarah J. Maas, for example, which confronts all of the author’s problematic behavior. And if you want to see Rachel take down a book bit by bit over the course of many hours (I know I did), watch her deep dive into Fourth Wing . Even if you really enjoyed Fourth Wing , it’s a fun watch.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: History of the Pale Lady

Love Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark ? Then you have to check out CZsWorld’s series of videos looking at the history of the stories in these books. I always found the pale lady incredibly creepy, so this is a great one to start with. But the channel also has videos about the history of the Jangly Man and Harold the Scarecrow . If you’ve read the Scary Stories books, then you know these characters, and their images probably haunt your nightmares. Now learn more about where they came from.

Medusa Then and Now: A Monster’s Feminist Reclamation?

Speaking of the history of monsters, here’s one we all know and love: Medusa. In this video essay, historian and author Jean of Jean’s Thoughts breaks down the story of Medusa, why she remains a pop culture icon, and how she has changed over the past thousands of years. Jean really knows her stuff, so if you want more video essays about mythology, she’s got you covered. For instance, here’s why Hades and Persephone aren’t the cute couple you think they are . Enjoy!

The Complicated Ethics of Ghostwriters and Celebrity Books

Okay, people love to hate on ghostwriting and celebrity memoirs. Maybe especially because so many ghostwritten celebrity books have become popular best-sellers over the past few years. But why do we hate on them so much when ghostwriting has been going on since the dawn of literary time? And are these books as bad as people make them out to be? Jack Edwards breaks it all down in this video essay.

Looking for more BookTube content? Same. Always. Here are 10 thriller BookTube accounts to follow . Or you can follow these Nonfiction BookTube accounts . Want to know more about BookTube and where it’s heading? Here’s the past, present and future of BookTube , according to BookTubers. Happy watching!

You Might Also Like

Filed under:

• Masterpieces of Streaming

The video essays that spawned an entire YouTube genre

Share this story.

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: The video essays that spawned an entire YouTube genre

Polygon’s latest series, The Masterpieces of Streaming , looks at the new batch of classics that have emerged from an evolving era of entertainment.

Like every medium before it, “video essays” on YouTube had a long road of production before being taken seriously. Film was undervalued in favor of literature, TV was undervalued in favor of film, and YouTube was undervalued in favor of TV. In over 10 years of video essays, though, there are some that stand out as landmarks of the form, masterpieces to bring new audiences in.

In Polygon’s list of the best video essays of 2020 , we outlined a taxonomy of what a video essay is . But time should be given to explain what video essays have been and where they might be going.

Video essays can be broken into three eras: pre-BreadTube, the BreadTube era, and post-BreadTube. So, what the hell is BreadTube? BreadTube, sometimes also called “LeftTube,” can be defined as a core group of high production value, academically-minded YouTubers who rose to prominence at the same time.

A brief history of video essays on YouTube

On YouTube, video essays pre-BreadTube started in earnest just after something completely unrelated to YouTube: the adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (or, colloquially, just the “Common Core”). The Common Core was highly political, a type of hotly-contested educational reform that hadn’t been rolled out in decades.

Meanwhile, YouTube was in one of its earliest golden eras in 2010. Four years prior, YouTube had been purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock, a number that is simultaneously bonkers high and bonkers low. Ad revenue for creators was flowing. Creators like PewDiePie and Shane Dawson were thriving (because time is a flat circle). With its 2012 Original Channel Initiative , Google invested $100 million, and later an additional $200 million, to both celebrity and independent creators for new, original content on YouTube in an early attempt to rival TV programming.

This was also incentivized by YouTube’s 2012 public change to their algorithm , favoring watch time over clicks.

But video essays still weren’t a major genre on YouTube until the educational turmoil and newfound funds collided, resulting in three major networks: Crash Course in 2011 and SourceFed and PBS Digital Studios in 2012.

The BreadTube Era

With Google’s AdSense making YouTube more and more profitable for some creators, production values rose, and longer videos rose in prominence in the algo. Key creators became household names, but there was a pattern: most were fairly left-leaning and white.

But in 2019, long-time YouTube creator Kat Blaque asked, “Why is ‘LeftTube’ so white?”

Blaque received massive backlash for her criticisms; however, many other nonwhite YouTubers took the opportunity to speak up. More examples include Cheyenne Lin’s “Why Is YouTube So White?” , Angie Speaks’ “Who Are Black Leftists Supposed to Be?” , and T1J’s “I’m Kinda Over This Whole ‘LeftTube’ Thing.”

Since the whiteness of video essays has been more clearly illuminated, terms like “BreadTube’’ and “LeftTube” are seldom used to describe the video essay space. Likewise, the importance of flashy production has been de-emphasized.

Post-BreadTube

Like most phenomena, BreadTube does not have a single moment one can point to as its end, but in 2020 and 2021, it became clear that the golden days of BreadTube were in the past.

And, notably, prominent BreadTube creators consistently found themselves in hot water on Twitter. If beauty YouTubers have mastered the art of the crying apology video, video essayists have begun the art of intellectualized, conceptualized, semi-apology video essays. Natalie Wynn’s “Canceling” and Lindsay Ellis’s “Mask Off” discuss the YouTubers’ experiences with backlash after some phenomenally yikes tweets. Similarly, Gita Jackson of Vice has reported on the racism of SocialismDoneLeft.

We’re now in post-BreadTube era. More Black creators, like Yhara Zayd and Khadija Mbowe, are valued as the important video essayists they are. Video essays and commentary channels are seeing more overlap, like the works of D’Angelo Wallace and Jarvis Johnson .

With a history of YouTube video essays out of the way, let’s discuss some of the best of the best, listed here in chronological order by release date, spanning all three eras of the genre. Only one video essay has been selected from each creator, and creators whose works have also been featured on our Best of 2020 list have different works selected here. If you like any of the following videos, we highly recommend checking out the creators’ backlogs; there are plenty of masterpieces in the mix.

PBS Idea Channel, “Can Dungeons & Dragons Make You A Confident & Successful Person?” (October 10, 2012)

Many of the conventions of modern video essays — a charismatic quick-talking host, eye-grabbing pop culture gifs accompanying narration, and sleek edits — began with PBS Idea Channel. Idea Channel, which ran from 2012 to 2017 and produced over 200 videos, laid many of the blueprints for video essays to come. In this episode, host Mike Rugnetta dissects the practical applications of tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons . The episode predates the tabletop renaissance, shepherded by Stranger Things and actual play podcasts , but gives the same level of love and appreciation the games would see in years to come.

Every Frame a Painting, “Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy” (May 26, 2014)

Like PBS Idea Channel, Every Frame a Painting was fundamental in setting the tone for video essays on YouTube. In this episode, the works of Edgar Wright (like Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World ) are put in contrast with the trend of dialogue-based comedy films like The Hangover and Bridesmaids . The essay analyzes the lack of visual jokes in the American comedian style of comedy and shows the value of Wright’s mastery of physical comedy. The video winds up not just pointing out what makes Wright’s films so great, but also explaining the jokes in meticulous detail without ever ruining them.

Innuendo Studios, “This Is Phil Fish” (June 16, 2014)

As documented in the 2012 documentary Indie Game: The Movie and all over Twitter, game designer Phil Fish is a contentious figure, to say the least. Known for public meltdowns and abusive behavior, Phil Fish is easy to armchair diagnose, but Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios uses this video to make something clear: We do not know Phil Fish. Before widespread discussions of parasocial relationships with online personalities, Innuendo Studios was pointing out the perils of treating semi-celebrities as anything other than strangers.

What’s So Great About That?, “Night In The Woods: Do You Always Have A Choice?” (April 20, 2017)

Player choice in video games is often emphasized as an integral facet of gameplay — but what if not having a real choice is the point? In this video, Grace Lee of What’s So Great About That? discusses how removing choice can add to a game’s narrative through the lens of sad, strange indie game Night in the Woods . What can a game with a mentally ill protagonist in a run-down post-industrial town teach us about what choices really mean, and how is a game the perfect way to depict that meaning? This video essay aims to make you see this game in a new light.

Pop Culture Detective, “Born Sexy Yesterday” (April 27, 2017)

One of the many “all killer no filler” channels on this list, Pop Culture Detective is best known as a trope namer. One of those tropes, “Born Sexy Yesterday,” encourages the audience to notice a specific, granular, but strangely prominent character trait in science fiction and fantasy: a female character who, through the conceit of the world and plot, has very little functional knowledge of the world around her, but is also a smoking hot adult. It’s sort of the reverse of the prominent anime trope of a grown woman, sometimes thousands of years old, inhabiting the body of a child. When broken down, the trope is not just a nightmare, it’s something you can’t unsee — and you start to see it everywhere .

Maggie Mae Fish, “Looking For Meaning in Tim Burton’s Movies” (April 24, 2018)

Tim Burton is an iconic example of an outsider making art for other outsiders who question and push the status quo ... right? In Maggie Mae Fish’s first video essay on her channel, she breaks down how Burton co-opts the anticapitalist aesthetics of German expressionism (most obviously, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ) to give an outsider edge to films that consistently, aggressively enforce the status quo. If you’re a die-hard Burton fan, this one might sting, but Jack Skellington would be proud of you for seeking knowledge. Just kidding. He’d probably want you to take the aesthetic of the knowledge and put it on something completely unrelated, removing it of meaning.

hbomberguy, “CTRL+ALT+DEL | SLA:3” (April 26, 2018)

Are you looking for a video essay with a little more unhinged chaos energy? Prepare yourself for this video by Harry Brewis, aka hbomberguy, analyzing the webcomic CTRL+ALT+DEL, and ultimately, the infamous loss.jpg. But this essay’s also more than that; it’s a response to the criticisms of analyzing pop culture, saying that sometimes art isn’t that deep, or that works can exist outside of the perspective of the creator. This video is infamous for its climax, which we won’t spoil here, but go in knowing it’s, at the very least, adjacent to not safe for work.

Folding Ideas, “A Lukewarm Defence of Fifty Shades of Grey” (August 31, 2018)

Speaking of not-safe-for-work, let’s talk about kink! Dan Olson of Folding Ideas has been creating phenomenal video essays for years. Highlighting “In Search of Flat Earth” as one of the best video essays in 2020 (and, honestly, ever) gives an opportunity to discuss his other masterpieces here: his three-part series dissecting the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. This introduction to the series discusses specifically the first film, and it does so in a way that is refreshingly kink-positive while still condemning the ways Fifty Shades has promoted extremely unsafe kink practices and dynamics. It also analyzes the first film with a shockingly fair lens, giving accolades where they’re due (that cinematography!) and ripping the film to shreds when necessary (what the hell are these characters?).

ToonrificTariq, “How To BLACK: An Analysis of Black Cartoon Characters (feat. ReviewYaLife)” (January 13, 2019)

While ToonrificTariq’s channel usually focuses on fantastic, engaging reviews of off-kilter nostalgic cartoons — think Braceface and As Told By Ginger — takes this video to explain the importance of writing Black characters in cartoons for kids, and not just one token Black friend per show. Through the lens of shows like Craig of the Creek and Proud Family , ToonrificTariq and guest co-host ReviewYaLife explain the way Black characters have been written into the boxes and how those tropes can be overcome by writers in the future. The collaboration between the two YouTubers also allows a mix of scripted, analytical content and some goofy, fun back-and-forth and riffing.

Jacob Geller, “Games, Schools, and Worlds Designed for Violence” (October 1, 2019)

Jacob Geller ( who has written for Polygon ) has this way of baking sincerity, vulnerability, and so much care into his video essays. This episode is rough, digging into what level design in war games can tell us about the architecture of American schools following the tragic Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. It’s a video essay about video games, about violence, about safety, and about childhood. It’s a video essay about what we prioritize and how, and what that priority can look like. It’s a video essay that will leave you with deep contemplation, but a hungry contemplation, a need to learn and observe more.

Accented Cinema, “Parasite: Mastering the Basics of Cinema” (November 7, 2019)

2019 Bong Joon-ho cinematic masterpiece Parasite is filled to the brim with things to analyze, but Yang Zhang of Accented Cinema takes his discussion back to the basics. Focusing on how the film uses camera positions, light, and lines, the essay shows the mastery of details many viewers might not have noticed on first watch. But once you do notice them, they’re extremely, almost comically overt, while still being incredibly effective. The way the video conveys these ideas is simple, straightforward, and accessible while still illuminating so much about the film and remaining engaging and fun to watch. Accented Cinema turns this video into a 101 film studies crash course, showing how mastery of the basics can make a film such a standout.

Kat Blaque, “So... Let’s Talk About JK Rowling’s Tweet” (December 23, 2019)

In 2020, J. K. Rowling wrote her most infamous tweet about trans people, exemplifying a debate about trans rights and identities that is still becoming more and more intense today. Rowling’s tweet was not the first, or the most important, or even her first — but it was one of the tweets about the issue that gained the most attention. Kat Blaque’s video essay on the tweet isn’t really about the tweet itself. Instead, it’s a masterful course in transphobia, TERFs, and how people hide their prejudice against trans people in progressive language. In an especially memorable passage, Blaque breaks down the tweet, line by line, phrase by phrase, explaining how each of them convey a different aspect of transphobia.

Philosophy Tube, “Data” (January 31, 2020)

One of the most underrated essays in Philosophy Tube’s catalogue, “Data” explains the importance of data privacy. Data privacy is often easily written off; “I have nothing to hide,” and “It makes my ads better,” are both given as defenses against the importance of data privacy. In this essay, though, creator Abigail Thorn breaks traditional essay form to depict an almost Plato-like philosophical dialogue between two characters: a bar patron and the bar’s bouncer. It’s also somewhat of a choose-your-own-adventure game, a post- Bandersnatch improvement upon the Bandersnatch concept.

Intelexual Media, “A Short History of American Celebrity” (February 13, 2020)

Historian Elexus Jionde of Intelexual Media has one of the strongest and sharpest analytical voices when discussing celebrity, from gossip to idolization to the celebrity industrial complex to stan culture . Her history of American celebrity is filled to the brim with information, fact following fact at a pace that’s breakneck without ever leaving the audience behind. While the video initially seems like just a history, there’s a thesis baked into the content about what celebrity is, how it got to where it is today, and where it might be going—and what all of that means about the rest of us.

Princess Weekes, “Empire and Imperialism in Children’s Cartoons—a super light topic” (June 22, 2020)

This video by Princess Weekes (Melina Pendulum) starts with a bang — a quick, goofy song followed by a steep dive into imperialization and its effect on intergenerational trauma. And then, it connects those concepts to much-beloved cartoons for kids like Avatar: The Last Airbender , Steven Universe , and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power . Fans of shows like these may be burnt out on fandom discourse quickly saying, “thing bad!” because of how they view its stance on imperialization. Weekes, however, has always favored nuance and close reading. Her take on imperialization in cartoons offers a more complex method of analyzing these shows, and the cartoons that will certainly drum up the same conversations in the future.

Yhara Zayd, “Holes & The Prison-Industrial Complex” (July 7, 2020)

2003’s Holes absolutely rules, and Yhara Zayd’s video essay on the film shows why it isn’t just a fun classic with memorable characters. It’s also way, way more complex than most of us might remember. Like Dan Olson, Yhara Zayd appeared on our list of the best video essays of 2020, but frankly, any one of her videos could belong there or here. What makes this analysis of Holes stand out is the meticulous attention to detail Zayd has in her analysis, revealing the threads that connect the film’s commentary across its multiple interwoven plotlines. And, of course, there’s Zayd’s trademark quiet passion for the work she’s discussing, making this essay just as much of a close reading as it is a love letter to the film.

D’Angelo Wallace, “The Disappearance of Blaire White” (November 2, 2020)

D’Angelo Wallace is best known as a commentary YouTuber, someone who makes videos reacting to current events, pop culture, and, of course, other YouTubers. With his hour-long essay on YouTuber Blaire White, though, that commentary took a sharp turn into cultural analysis and introspection. For those unfamiliar with White’s work, she was once a prominent trans YouTuber known for her somewhat right-wing politics, including her discussion of other trans people. In Wallace’s video, her career is outlined — but so is the effect she had on her viewers. What is it about creators like White that makes them compelling? And what does it take for us to reevaluate what they’ve been saying?

Chromalore, “The Last Unicorn: Death and the Legacy of Fantasy” (December 3, 2020)

Chromalore is a baffling internet presence. With one video essay up, one single tweet, and a Twitter bio that simply reads, “just one (1) video essay, as a treat,” this channel feels like the analysis equivalent of seeing someone absolutely captivating at a party who you know you’ll never see again, and who you know you’ll never forget.

This video essay discusses themes of death, memory, identity, remorse, and humanity as seen through both the film and the novel The Last Unicorn . It weaves together art history and music, Christian iconography and anime-inspired character designs. It talks about why this film is so beloved and the effect it’s had on audiences today. It’s moving, deeply researched, brilliantly executed, and we will probably never see this creator again.

Khadija Mbowe, “Digital Blackface?” (December 23, 2020)

“Digital Blackface” is a term popularized by Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2017 Teen Vogue essay, “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs.” The piece explains the prominence of white people using the images of Black people without context to convey a reaction, and Khadija Mbowe’s deep dive on the subject expands on how, and why, blackface tropes have evolved in the digital sphere. Mbowe’s essay involves a great deal of history and analysis, all of which is deeply uncomfortable. Consider this a content warning for depictions of racism throughout the video. But that discomfort is key to explaining why digital blackface is such a problem and how nonblack people, especially white people, can be more cognizant about how they depict their reactions online.

CJ the X, “No Face Is An Incel” (April 4, 2021)

Rounding out this list is a 2021 newcomer to video essays with an endlessly enjoyable gremlin energy that still winds up being some of the smartest, sharpest, and funniest discussions about pop culture. CJ the X, a human sableye , breaks down one of the most iconic and merch-ified Studio Ghibli characters, No Face, who is an incel. This is a video essay best experienced with no knowledge except its main thesis—that No Face is an incel—so you can sit back, be beguiled, be enraptured, and then be convinced.

TCL’s 85” Class XL Collection

Prices taken at time of publishing.

TCL’s new XL collection creates a larger-than-life entertainment experience. From watching movies and shows to playing the hottest new game these 85” TVs come loaded with features to suit any entertainment needs.

• $2,999 at Amazon
• $2,999 at Best Buy

The Masterpieces of Streaming

TriQuarterly

Search form, an introduction to video essays.

The works in our winter suite are interested in process. These three new videos demonstrate how, like other literary genres, the “video essay” gets redefined by every new iteration. Like early examples of video art, each piece repurposes a technology to highlight the accidental art-experiences available within a utilitarian process.

In our first video, “Ars Poetica,” Kelly Slivka compresses the inherent audio/video qualities of digital composition—the sound of keys tapping, the flash of copy-paste, all the sensory layers of writing-aloud. While this project might serve as a document of what writing was like in the early digital age, it also demonstrates the various lives and “meanings” a poem briefly inhabits on its way to a final version. “Ars Poetica” has us thinking about poems as being always already in flux. As the audience watches Slivka compose, we begin to root for the writer to get each word right, to come toward a point of rest, a final utterance, even—and because—it won’t be their last.

Our second video, “The Center” by Annelyse Gelman has us eyeing the eerie potential for non-human entities to replicate or replace human jobs, relationships, and even literature. Like examples of video art that pushed the limits of early green screen technology, “The Center” repurposes face swap and text-to-voice in a savvy, uncanny pairing of poetry and digital media that brings out the specific resonances of the text. Gelman’s project nods to animal experiments involving cages with electrified flooring, centers and peripheries that implicate and confront the viewer: “Are you thinking about your own heartbeat?” 

Using a style that sets high-quality footage to the pace of slow breathing, Allain Daigle’s “New Arctic” thinks about the future of our planet without using images of landscape. In this project, Daigle shows us a house being built from the inside: industrial lighting, radio waves, breaths that rise in parcels. He asks us to consider the changes “our skin doesn’t notice” that mean our children will “dream about icebergs,” because “the new Arctic,” of course, is an oxymoron.

The videos in this suite trick us into seeing three familiar technologies in unfamiliar ways. Each piece showcases the variety of formats, structures, and new media that today’s literary videos might take on.

Issue 155  Winter / Spring 2019

Next: , share triquarterly, about the author, sarah minor.

Sarah Minor is the author of  Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit  (Noemi Press 2021),  Bright Archive  (Rescue Press 2020), winner of the 2020 Big Other Nonfiction Book Award and  The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated  from Essay Press. She is the recipient of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, an Individual Research Grant from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, and the Kenyon Writers' Workshop. Her essays have been collected in places like  Best American Experimental Writing ,  Advanced Creative Nonfiction , and  A Harp in the Stars.  Minor holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Ohio University. She currently teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

The Latest Word

What is a Video Essay? The Art of the Video Analysis Essay

I n the era of the internet and Youtube, the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of expressing ideas and concepts. However, there is a bit of an enigma behind the construction of the video essay largely due to the vagueness of the term.

What defines a video analysis essay? What is a video essay supposed to be about? In this article, we’ll take a look at the foundation of these videos and the various ways writers and editors use them creatively. Let’s dive in.

Watch: Our Best Film Video Essays of the Year

Subscribe for more filmmaking videos like this.

What is a video essay?

First, let’s define video essay.

There is narrative film, documentary film, short films, and then there is the video essay. What is its role within the realm of visual media? Let’s begin with the video essay definition. 

VIDEO ESSAY DEFINITION

A video essay is a video that analyzes a specific topic, theme, person or thesis. Because video essays are a rather new form, they can be difficult to define, but recognizable nonetheless. To put it simply, they are essays in video form that aim to persuade, educate, or critique. 

These essays have become increasingly popular within the era of Youtube and with many creatives writing video essays on topics such as politics, music, film, and pop culture. 

What is a video essay used for?

• To persuade an audience of a thesis
• To educate on a specific subject
• To analyze and/or critique 

What is a video essay based on?

Establish a thesis.

Video analysis essays lack distinguished boundaries since there are countless topics a video essayist can tackle. Most essays, however, begin with a thesis. 

How Christopher Nolan Elevates the Movie Montage  •  Video Analysis Essays

Good essays often have a point to make. This point, or thesis, should be at the heart of every video analysis essay and is what binds the video together. 

Related Posts

• Stanley Kubrick Directing Style Explained →
• A Filmmaker’s Guide to Nolan’s Directing Style →
• How to Write a Voice Over Montage in a Script →

interviews in video essay

Utilize interviews.

A key determinant for the structure of an essay is the source of the ideas. A common source for this are interviews from experts in the field. These interviews can be cut and rearranged to support a thesis. 

Roger Deakins on "Learning to Light"  •  Video Analysis Essays

Utilizing first hand interviews is a great way to utilize ethos into the rhetoric of a video. However, it can be limiting since you are given a limited amount to work with. Voice over scripts, however, can give you the room to say anything. 

How to create the best video essays on Youtube

Write voice over scripts.

Voice over (VO) scripts allow video essayists to write out exactly what they want to say. This is one of the most common ways to structure a video analysis essay since it gives more freedom to the writer. It is also a great technique to use when taking on large topics.

In this video, it would have been difficult to explain every type of camera lens by cutting sound bites from interviews of filmmakers. A voice over script, on the other hand, allowed us to communicate information directly when and where we wanted to.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Lenses  •  Video essay examples

Some of the most famous video essayists like Every Frame a Painting and Nerdwriter1 utilize voice over to capitalize on their strength in writing video analysis essays. However, if you’re more of an editor than a writer, the next type of essay will be more up your alley. 

Video analysis essay without a script

Edit a supercut.

Rather than leaning on interview sound bites or voice over, the supercut video depends more on editing. You might be thinking “What is a video essay without writing?” The beauty of the video essay is that the writing can be done throughout the editing. Supercuts create arguments or themes visually through specific sequences. 

Another one of the great video essay channels, Screen Junkies, put together a supercut of the last decade in cinema. The video could be called a portrait of the last decade in cinema.

2010 - 2019: A Decade In Film  •  Best videos on Youtube

This video is rather general as it visually establishes the theme of art during a general time period. Other essays can be much more specific. 

Critical essays

Video essays are a uniquely effective means of creating an argument. This is especially true in critical essays. This type of video critiques the facets of a specific topic. 

In this video, by one of the best video essay channels, Every Frame a Painting, the topic of the film score is analyzed and critiqued — specifically temp film score.

Every Frame a Painting Marvel Symphonic Universe  •  Essay examples

Of course, not all essays critique the work of artists. Persuasion of an opinion is only one way to use the video form. Another popular use is to educate. 

• The Different Types of Camera Lenses →
• Write and Create Professionally Formatted Screenplays →
• How to Create Unforgettable Film Moments with Music →

Video analysis essay

Visual analysis.

One of the biggest advantages that video analysis essays have over traditional, written essays is the use of visuals. The use of visuals has allowed video essayists to display the subject or work that they are analyzing. It has also allowed them to be more specific with what they are analyzing. Writing video essays entails structuring both words and visuals. 

Take this video on There Will Be Blood for example. In a traditional, written essay, the writer would have had to first explain what occurs in the film then make their analysis and repeat.

This can be extremely inefficient and redundant. By analyzing the scene through a video, the points and lessons are much more clear and efficient. 

There Will Be Blood  •   Subscribe on YouTube

Through these video analysis essays, the scene of a film becomes support for a claim rather than the topic of the essay. 

Dissect an artist

Essays that focus on analysis do not always focus on a work of art. Oftentimes, they focus on the artist themself. In this type of essay, a thesis is typically made about an artist’s style or approach. The work of that artist is then used to support this thesis.

Nerdwriter1, one of the best video essays on Youtube, creates this type to analyze filmmakers, actors, photographers or in this case, iconic painters. 

Caravaggio: Master Of Light  •  Best video essays on YouTube

In the world of film, the artist video analysis essay tends to cover auteur filmmakers. Auteur filmmakers tend to have distinct styles and repetitive techniques that many filmmakers learn from and use in their own work. 

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps the most notable example. In this video, we analyze Kubrick’s best films and the techniques he uses that make so many of us drawn to his films. 

Why We're Obsessed with Stanley Kubrick Movies  •  Video essay examples

Critical essays and analytical essays choose to focus on a piece of work or an artist. Essays that aim to educate, however, draw on various sources to teach technique and the purpose behind those techniques. 

What is a video essay written about?

Historical analysis.

Another popular type of essay is historical analysis. Video analysis essays are a great medium to analyze the history of a specific topic. They are an opportunity for essayists to share their research as well as their opinion on history. 

Our video on aspect ratio , for example, analyzes how aspect ratios began in cinema and how they continue to evolve. We also make and support the claim that the 2:1 aspect ratio is becoming increasingly popular among filmmakers. 

Why More Directors are Switching to 18:9  •  Video analysis essay

Analyzing the work of great artists inherently yields a lesson to be learned. Some essays teach more directly.

• Types of Camera Movements in Film Explained →
• What is Aspect Ratio? A Formula for Framing Success →
• Visualize your scenes with intuitive online shotlist software →

Writing video essays about technique

Teach technique.

Educational essays designed to teach are typically more direct. They tend to be more valuable for those looking to create art rather than solely analyze it.

In this video, we explain every type of camera movement and the storytelling value of each. Educational essays must be based on research, evidence, and facts rather than opinion.

Ultimate Guide to Camera Movement  •  Best video essays on YouTube

As you can see, there are many reasons why the video essay has become an increasingly popular means of communicating information. Its ability to use both sound and picture makes it efficient and effective. It also draws on the language of filmmaking to express ideas through editing. But it also gives writers the creative freedom they love. 

Writing video essays is a new art form that many channels have set high standards for. What is a video essay supposed to be about? That’s up to you. 

Organize Post Production Workflow

The quality of an essay largely depends on the quality of the edit. If editing is not your strong suit, check out our next article. We dive into tips and techniques that will help you organize your Post-Production workflow to edit like a pro. 

Up Next: Post Production →

Showcase your vision with elegant shot lists and storyboards..

Create robust and customizable shot lists. Upload images to make storyboards and slideshows.

Learn More ➜

I wish I could've submitted video essays instead of term papers back in film school. It's such a digestible form to learn and discover new ideas. And it looks like it'd be way more fun than writing a paper and adjusting all the margins and period sizes to hit the page count minimum.

2 big questions- What about copyright claims from the rightsholders/studios of all the movie clips that are going into these "essays" ?

How does one avoid be flagged by YouTube and having the work being taken down?

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Pricing & Plans
• Product Updates
• Featured On
• StudioBinder Partners
• The Ultimate Guide to Call Sheets (with FREE Call Sheet Template)
• How to Break Down a Script (with FREE Script Breakdown Sheet)
• The Only Shot List Template You Need — with Free Download
• Managing Your Film Budget Cashflow & PO Log (Free Template)
• A Better Film Crew List Template Booking Sheet
• Best Storyboard Softwares (with free Storyboard Templates)
• Movie Magic Scheduling
• Gorilla Software
• Storyboard That

A visual medium requires visual methods. Master the art of visual storytelling with our FREE video series on directing and filmmaking techniques.

We’re in a golden age of TV writing and development. More and more people are flocking to the small screen to find daily entertainment. So how can you break put from the pack and get your idea onto the small screen? We’re here to help.

• Making It: From Pre-Production to Screen
• How to Get a Film Permit — A Step-by-Step Breakdown
• How to Make a Storyboard: Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide (2024)
• VFX vs. CGI vs. SFX — Decoding the Debate
• What is a Freeze Frame — The Best Examples & Why They Work
• TV Script Format 101 — Examples of How to Format a TV Script
• 100 Facebook
• 0 Pinterest

The Video Essay: Celebrating an Exciting New Literary Form

• Student Experience
• Weinberg College

EVANSTON, Ill. --- TriQuarterly, Northwestern University’s celebrated literary journal that moved to an online format three years ago, is among the leading literary outlets of the video essay, an exciting new literary form.

"Today's digital technology gives writers unprecedented creative freedom," said Northwestern faculty member John Bresland, who curates the online journal’s video essays. An award-winning essayist working in video, radio and print, he equates the impact of 21st century technology on creativity to the invention of the printing press.

TriQuarterly, an international journal of writing, art and cultural inquiry, is part of Northwestern's degree program in creative writing, one of the nation's few part-time graduate writing programs. The latest issue of the magazine is twice the usual size, and it features a piece by noted author Ron Carlson as well. 

See the new Summer/Fall 2013 issue of TriQuarterly online. 

Writers of every genre who have composed on the page for decades -- novelist Bill Roorbach, essayist and Northwestern faculty member Eula Biss, poet Joe Wenderoth -- now also author works for the screen. Variations of this fast-emerging form of expression are taught in institutions of higher education across the country. 

When Bresland surveyed the curricula of 30 major universities, he found nearly all offered classes similar to video essay courses he teaches in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and School of Continuing Studies. But what he calls video essay, another university might label "experimental media," "multimedia storytelling" or "writing with video." 

That lack of uniformity reminds Bresland that turn-of-the-century cars were once called horseless carriages. "In 1885, we could only name this invention with familiar terms -- part horse, part buggy -- though clearly it was a radically new category that reordered the landscape," he said. 

As today’s literary landscape is reordered by digital technology, TriQuarterly is embracing not just the video essay but a form of visual poetry called “cinepoetry,” a term borrowed from avant-garde photographer Man Ray. When TQ’s latest edition launches July 15, it will include a suite of five video essays and “cinepoems.” 

Bresland’s personal site  is jam-packed with video essays and writings about the new genre, including his highly influential  “On the Origin of the Video Essay.” We talked with Bresland and asked him to expand on this revolutionary literary development. 

How are mobile technologies revolutionizing the essay?

The screen of an iPad, for example, isn’t just a substitute for paper. It’s a canvas, a movie screen, an animation studio, a keyboard, a guitar, a microphone, a mixing board. The mobile devices we now use to collect our thoughts and memories don’t care whether we compose using words or images or sounds or all three. I believe the act of writing will always be, as writer Don DeLillo describes it, a concentrated form of thinking. But I also believe that fewer authors in the years ahead will choose to stop at the printed word.”

How do your students respond to this new literary form?  

They go bright-eyed when you tell them writing doesn’t mean strictly words on a page. Most own a mobile device capable of acquiring video and sound. They delight in making sense of their world using the full arsenal of sensory input -- image, text, sound, voice. Not that it’s all wine and roses. I think most students realize, in the end, that no matter the medium, the heavy lifting of real thinking can’t be avoided. 

Where is the video essay appearing?

Today I know of about a dozen literary journals that feature video essays and poems; 10 years ago there were none. I believe Blackbird and Ninth Letter were the first to realize the possibilities of a new kind of literature conveyed with image and sound, yet still had language at its core. Press Play is doing some thrilling work in the form, perhaps altering the rules of engagement between critic and film. TriQuarterly has featured video essays for 18 months. 

Can you describe some the video essays or cinepoems that have appeared in TQ?

One of my favorites is Dinty W. Moore’s “ History ." Moore is an accomplished essayist who I knew could take great photographs but had never before worked in video. “History” is a memoir assembled from the faces of strangers he photographed in Scotland. It’s just a moving, gorgeous work. 

TriQuarterly often features the still image in video essays. Angela Mears’ “ You Are Here ” and Bill Roorbach’s “ Starflower ” are short, brilliant essays built around a single still, and intense meditations likely to alter the viewer’s relationship to that image. 

Kristen Radtke’s “ That Kind of Daughter ” is another great video essay. Visually it’s animated as a cut-out, one of the oldest animation techniques there is, just flat shapes arranged within a frame. But the text is so good and so densely lyrical and personal that it takes your breath away.

I also really love “ Wolfvision ” by Robin Schiff, who recently had a poem in The New Yorker, and Nick Twemlow. Assembled from Schiff’s text and from video that Twemlow gleaned from YouTube, “Wolfvision” is a haunting and beautiful essay, if it’s an essay. I do think the video essay lends itself to poetry, often skirting the line separating these two genre categories, if such a line really exists.  

Are there other subgenres of the video essay?

There are at least two that have been getting a lot of attention the past couple years. One, which tends to go viral -- no doubt because it’s such a pleasure to experience -- is the video essay made up entirely of clips from previously released films, often held together and enriched by a sustained voiceover track. A wonderful recent work by Kevin B. Lee, called “ The Spielberg Face ” is a wall-to-wall compilation of reaction shots from the famous director’s body of work -- full of moments like the one in “Jaws” when Sheriff Brody first sees the shark, right before he utters the greatest line in the history of deadpan. 

Aaron Aradillas and Matt Zoller Seitz have consistently produced compulsively watchable, insightful video essays about the credit sequences of David Fincher films, say, or “Rocky III,” as a test-bed for the popular films of the 1980s that followed it. What’s key is that critics have found a new venue for talking about film that’s not on the page -- their voices overlay the films themselves. It’s the perfect match of subject and form. Before the advent of online video in 2006 or so, this never would have been possible.

Another subgenre popping up all over academia is a hybrid of the personal essay and the old-school academic essay. A few years ago, Tufts University invited applicants to submit video essays that said “something about you.”  Some 1,000 applicants took up the challenge. On the strength of Tufts’ video essay buzz, the number of applicants surged to its highest level in a generation. And now there’s not an admissions dean in America who hasn’t taken note. Dartmouth’s dean of admissions told National Public Radio that there’s no stopping video: “It’s the language of this generation.” As more and more media savvy students enter the academy, more teachers are compelled to speak that language. 

Are there already “masters” of the video essay?

I’ve always loved Agnes Varda, who looks like this nice old French lady but, in fact, makes fierce essays for the screen. Her best might be “The Gleaners and I,” which came out in 2000 and caused something of a sensation in France and was popular here, too. Maybe we’re hungry for films that make us do more than “feel” -- we want to think, too, and we want to act on our convictions. 

Chris Marker’s 1983 “Sans Soleil” is another classic film essay that, like any great work of art, seems to change as we change. But the greats don’t all have French passports. Ross McElwee has been releasing personal film-essays for decades -- “Time Indefinite” in 1993 and “Bright Leaves” in 2003 are among my favorites. What these filmmakers have in common is a knack for making smart, literate films that invite the viewer to co-create meaning. Most films today don’t leave any room for the viewer’s imagination. The smallness of the video essay, the fact that it tends to be the work of a single author or just one or two collaborators, can result in a work that’s less interested in a commercial payoff and more interested in asking difficult questions of others and of ourselves. 

Editor’s Picks

This algorithm makes robots perform better

‘the night watchman’ named next one book selection, six northwestern faculty elected to american academy of arts and sciences, related stories.

The childhood of Hans Christian Andersen explored in musical at Northwestern University

Northwestern academy supports evanston students, trethewey named to the academy of american poets.

CFP: Literature and the Video Essay. Researching and Teaching Literature Through Moving Images

Editors: Adriana Margareta Dancus (University of South-Eastern Norway) and Alan O’Leary (Aarhus University)

This special issue explores how the video essay can function as an academic and pedagogic resource in the study and teaching of literature.

Literature and literature instruction are central components in the language subjects. In this special issue, we use the term ‘literature’ in a broad sense to encompass narratives in different genres and media, including picture books, comics, feature and documentary films, narrative apps, and computer games with an intrinsic aesthetical value. Didactic perspectives on literature encompass questions about why and how to teach literature as well as what literary texts to choose from in the language subjects. Further, we adopt a ‘performative’ approach to research whereby the video essay is conceived as a form that generates new theoretical and analytical insights.

Contributors will produce own video essays (5-12 minutes) accompanied by an academic guiding text between 1000-1500 words that fleshes out the relevance of the topic, positions the video essay in a larger academic context, and provides critical reflections on the process of making the video essay.

We welcome contributions in English, Danish, Norwegian or Swedish.

Abstracts (300 words) and a one page-mood board which visualizes the project should be sent to [email protected] by May 31, 2023.

Why the video essay in literary studies?

Since its very inception, the audiovisual has always struck a core with children and youth. Young generations who grow up in the digital age are both avid consumers and producers of audiovisual content. What can the audiovisual afford the teaching of literature and how does the audiovisual impact literary scholarship in the digital age? These questions are important to explore if we keep in mind the following paradox facing Nordic educational systems, especially the teaching of language subjects in Nordic schools. On the one hand, statistics show that Nordic children and youth spend significant amounts of time on social media and gaming, while the desire to read literature, as well as the amount of time spent on reading for pleasure, enjoyment, and meaningful cultural experiences, drops significantly with age, particularly among boys (Hansen et. al, 2022; Ipsos, 2022; Swedish Ministry of Culture, 2020). On the other hand, a consistent body of scholarship shows how reading literature is important for the development of critical thinking, democratic skills, and emotional literacy, to name a few (see Andersen, 2011; Nussbaum, 2016; Tørnby, 2020). In Norway, the educational reform from 2020 seeks to address this paradox by promoting a combination of formal, contextual, and interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that encourage an aesthetic and critical engagement with literature (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training n.d.).

Parallel to these developments, the video essay has gained academic terrain in the last decade. [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies is the first peer-reviewed academic journal exclusively dedicated to videographic film studies, and an increasing number of academic journals publish video essays in special issues or independently. Most scholarly video essays produced today spring out of film, media, and game studies. Scholars in these fields praise this format for its capacity to rejuvenate and enhance academic film and TV criticism, incite critical cinephilia, make film students focus on the conceptual challenges and poetic possibilities of digital technology, and afford important reflections on the balance between poetic and explanatory modes of knowledge production (see Grant 2013, 2016; Keathley 2011, 2012; Keathley et al. 2019; Lavik 2012). Christian Keathley (2011), a founding editor of [in]Transition together with Catherine Grant and others, argues that the best video essays are marked by a unique combination: “a simultaneous faithfulness to the object of study and an imaginative use of it” (183). Grant (2013), who over the years has produced a significant amount of video essays, further underlines that the video essay is not about the translation of written film studies into audiovisual ones, but an attempt to create ontologically new scholarly forms that can live alongside traditional scholarly writing such as articles or monographs.

‘How’ the video essay in literary studies?

In a literary context, the video essay encourages an intimate, exploratory, and performative approach to literary studies that can engage with the expectations of young generations who grow up with access to the Internet and advanced portable digital devices. Most importantly, the video essay can inspire new ways of doing academic literary criticism and teaching literature in the digital age.

Relevant inquiries include, but are not limited to:

• How can the video essay afford presentation and learning of complex literary phenomena?
•  What possibilities lie in the “showing” and “moving” of literature through techniques such as juxtaposition, superimposition, split screen, fast and slow motion, pausing, zooming or mixing sound, etc.?
•  What kind of literary knowledge is produced when digital skills are put in the service of making video essays about literature?
• How is the video essay suited to the fleshing out of and engagement with the multisensory and affective impact of literary texts?
• What kinds of collaborations and collaborative forms of learning does the video essay encourage in literary studies?
• How can the video essay contribute to interdisciplinarity in literary studies?
• How does the video essay allow the exploration of literary theory centered around notions of authorship, genre, adaptation, and intertextuality?
• What can the practice-based methods of the video essay offer scholars and students of literature?
• How, and to what extent, can video essay-making help to develop a creative-critical competence in practitioners and students?

Guest editors:

Adriana Margareta Dancus is Professor of Norwegian at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her research focuses on the affective investments afforded by contemporary Nordic cinema and literature and vulnerability as a resource. Dancus is the author of Exposing Vulnerability: Self-Mediation in Scandinavian Films by Women (Intellect/The University of Chicago Press 2019) and co-editor of Vulnerability in Scandinavian Art and Culture (Palgrave McMillan 2020) and Litteratur og sårbarhet (Universitetsforlaget 2021).

Alan O’Leary is Associate Professor of Film and Media in Digital Contexts at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Visiting Researcher in the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds, UK. He has published video essays in [in]Transition and 16:9 and his most recent book is a study of the 1966 postcolonial film classic The Battle of Algiers ( Mimesis International, 2019 ). He is working on a videographic ‘monograph’ on the poetics of videographic criticism and his ‘ Workshop of Potential Scholarship: Manifesto for a parametric videographic criticism ’ was published in NECSUS in 2021.

Contributors and forms of collaboration :

Scholars in the fields of literature, art, film, TV, media, computer games, education and education research are invited to submit contributions to this special issue.

To foster an academic community around the video essay as form of research and teaching in literary studies, we structure submissions in four phases, with submission two and three being followed by a digital work-in-progress seminar in which we discuss our projects as a group together with the editorial team:

- Abstracts (300 words) and one page-mood board which visualizes the project - Rough cut of video essay - Fine cut of video essay and first draft of academic guiding text - Final cut of video essay and final draft of academic guiding text

The exacts dates for the work-in-progress seminars will be communicated to authors well in advance.

Guidelines for the video essay and the guiding text:

The video essay and the guiding text will be reviewed together according to the following criteria:

- Originality: the project makes an important and innovative contribution to knowledge and understanding - Significance: the project expands the range and depth of existing research - Rigor: coherence of aesthetic means and epistemic goals and/or clear arguments, precise methodology, powerful analysis, good citation practices (of written and audio-visual sources), follows ethical guidelines for research in the humanities - Technical and stylistic execution: good sound quality, cinematography, editing and text/typography that serve the purpose of the project

While the co-editors cannot support the technical development of the video essay, we use the work-in-progress seminars to advise on the aesthetic and conceptual development of the piece.

The final cut of the video essay is handed in as a separate .mp4- video-file. The guiding text is handed in a Word-file according to the house style guide of the journal.

Working timetable: 31 MAY 2023: Submission of abstracts and mood board JUNE 2023: Individual response to authors of abstract SEPTEMBER 2023: Rough cut of the video essay OCTOBER 2023: Work-in-progress seminar: Discuss rough cuts DECEMBER 2023: Fine cut of the video essays and first draft of the academic guiding text JANUARY 2024: Work-in-progress seminar: Discuss fine cut and first draft MARCH 2024: Final cut of video essay and final draft of academic guiding text MAY 2024: Individual feedback from peer reviewers JULY 2024: Submit revised video essays and academic guiding text after the peer review FALL 2024: Publication expected

Cited works and recommended readings: Andersen, P.T. (2011). Hva skal vi med skjønnlitteraturen i skolen?. Norsklæraren , 2(11), 15–22.

Grant, C. (2013). How long is a piece of string? On the Practice, Scope and Value of Videographic Film Studies and Criticism. The Audiovisual Essay. https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/frankfurt-papers/catherine-grant/ Grant, C. (2016). The audiovisual essay as performative research. NECSUS . https://necsus-ejms.org/the-audiovisual-essay-as-performative-research/.

Hansen, S.R., T.I. Hansen & M. Pettersson. (2022). Børn og unges læsning 2021 . Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

Ipsos. (2022). Barn&Ungdom 2022 – Målgruppe mellom 8 og 19 år. Ipsos Barn og ungdomsundersøkelser. https://www.ipsos.com/nb-no/barnungdom-2022-malgruppe-mellom-8-og-19-ar.

Keathley, C. (2011). La caméra-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia. In A. Clayton & A. Klevan (Eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism (p. 176-191). Routledge.

Keathley, C. (2012). Teaching the Scholarly Video. Frames, 1(1). https://framescinemajournal.com/article/teaching-the-scholarly-video/.

Keathley, C., J. Mittell & C. Grant. (2019). The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. http://videographicessay.org/works/videographic-essay/index

Lavik, E. (2012). The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism. Frames, 1(1). http://framescinemajournal.com/article/the-video-essay-the-future/

Learning on Screen. (2020). Introductory Guide to Video Essays. https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/guidance/introductory-guide-to-video-essays/.

Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training (n.d.). Core Curriculum – Values and Principles for Primary and Secondary Education. https://www.udir.no/lk20/overordnet-del/?lang=eng.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2016). Litteraturen etikk – følelser og forestillingsevne. Oslo: Pax forlag.

Swedish Ministry of Culture (2020). Barns og ungas läsing (Skr. 2020/21:95). Government of Sweden. https://www.regeringen.se/496374/contentassets/83baa2be54344a508317cbd4738c1058/barns-och-ungas-lasning-skr.-20202195.pdf The Cine-files. (2014). Special Issue on Video Essay. http://issue7.thecine-files.com/.

The Cine-files. (2020). Special Issue on the scholarly video essay. http://www.thecine-files.com/issue15-position-papers/.

Tørnby, H. (2020). Picturebooks in the Classroom. Perspectives on life skills, sustainable development and democracy & citizenship. Fagbokforlaget.

Example video essays and collections:

This selection is intended to give a sense of some of the different registers, structures and approaches adopted by video essayists.

• Ariel Avissar (ed.), TV Dictionary. Vimeo showcase. https://vimeo.com/showcase/8660446   

· Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer (eds.), Once Upon A Screen vol. 2 (part 1), [in]Transition 9:3 (2022). http://mediacommons.org/intransition/journal-videographic-film-moving-image-studies-93-2022

· Johannes Binotto, Practices of Viewing. Vimeo showcase. https://vimeo.com/showcase/9086821

· Stephanie Brown, ‘Desktop Documentary and the Practice of Everyday Life’ (2021). https://videos.files.wordpress.com/iIRJ7qk5/stephaniebrowndesktopdoc_mov_hd.mp4

· Elisabeth Brun, ‘3xShapes of Home’ (2020). Screenworks 11:1 (2021). https://screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-11-1/thinking-through-form

· Allison De Fren, ‘Fembot in a Red Dress’. [in]Transition 2:4 (2016). http://mediacommons.org/intransition/fembot-red-dress

· Miguel Mesquita Duarte. ‘The Birds, after Hitchcock’. [in]Transition 5:4 (2019). http://mediacommons.org/intransition/birds-after-hitchcock

· Chloé Galibert-Laîné, ‘Watching THE PAIN OF OTHERS’. [in]Transition 6:3 (2019). http://mediacommons.org/intransition/watching-pain-others

· Ian Garwood, ‘The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism’. NECSUS Autumn (2016). https://necsus-ejms.org/the-place-of-voiceover-in-audiovisual-film-and-television-criticism/.

· _____ ‘SLAP THAT BASS zoomed’ (2021). https://vimeo.com/430707925  

· Catherine Grant, ‘The Haunting of THE HEADLESS WOMAN’ (2019). https://vimeo.com/301095918

·_____‘Touching the Film Object?’ (2011). https://vimeo.com/28201216.

· _____‘UN/CONTAINED: A Video Essay on Andrea Arnold’s (2009) Film FISHTANK’. https://filmanalytical.blogspot.com/2016/01/uncontained-video-essay-on-andrea.html.

· Christian Keathley, ‘Pass the Salt’ (2006). https://vimeo.com/23266798

· Evelyn Kreutzer, ‘ On Psycho and The Witches’. The Cine Files 15 (2020). http://www.thecine-files.com/on-psycho-and-the-witches/.

· Evelyn Kreutzer and Noga Stiazzy. 'The Archival In-Between’. Audiovisual Traces 4 (2022). https://film-history.org/issues/text/digital-digging-traces-gazes-and-archival-between

· Kevin B. Lee, ‘TRANSFORMERS: THE PREMAKE (a desktop documentary)’ (2014). https://vimeo.com/94101046

· _____'Mourning with Minari' (2021). https://vimeo.com/530395705.

· Jason Mittell, ‘ADAPTATION.’s Anomalies’(2016). https://vimeo.com/142425249

· Darline Morales, ‘Touki Dollars’. The Cine Files 11 (2016). http://www.thecine-files.com/touki-dollars-issue11/ .

· Alan O’Leary, ‘No Voiding Time: A Deformative Video Essay’. 16:9 Filmtidsskrift (2019). http://www.16-9.dk/2019/09/no-voiding-time/

· Matt Payne, ‘Who Ever Heard…?’ (2019), https://vimeo.com/342772573

· Sight and Sound. (2020-2022). Annual best video essays polls: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2022 https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-video-essays-2021 https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/best-video-essays-2020

• Norsk Bokmål

ISSN: 2704-0968

Contact: [email protected] 

How to Write a Good English Literature Essay

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

How do you write a good English Literature essay? Although to an extent this depends on the particular subject you’re writing about, and on the nature of the question your essay is attempting to answer, there are a few general guidelines for how to write a convincing essay – just as there are a few guidelines for writing well in any field.

We at Interesting Literature  call them ‘guidelines’ because we hesitate to use the word ‘rules’, which seems too programmatic. And as the writing habits of successful authors demonstrate, there is no  one way to become a good writer – of essays, novels, poems, or whatever it is you’re setting out to write. The French writer Colette liked to begin her writing day by picking the fleas off her cat.

Edith Sitwell, by all accounts, liked to lie in an open coffin before she began her day’s writing. Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk, claiming he needed the scent of their decay to help him write. (For most student essay-writers, such an aroma is probably allowed to arise in the writing-room more organically, over time.)

We will address our suggestions for successful essay-writing to the average student of English Literature, whether at university or school level. There are many ways to approach the task of essay-writing, and these are just a few pointers for how to write a better English essay – and some of these pointers may also work for other disciplines and subjects, too.

Of course, these guidelines are designed to be of interest to the non-essay-writer too – people who have an interest in the craft of writing in general. If this describes you, we hope you enjoy the list as well. Remember, though, everyone can find writing difficult: as Thomas Mann memorably put it, ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’ Nora Ephron was briefer: ‘I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.’ So, the guidelines for successful essay-writing:

1. Planning is important, but don’t spend too long perfecting a structure that might end up changing.

This may seem like odd advice to kick off with, but the truth is that different approaches work for different students and essayists. You need to find out which method works best for you.

It’s not a bad idea, regardless of whether you’re a big planner or not, to sketch out perhaps a few points on a sheet of paper before you start, but don’t be surprised if you end up moving away from it slightly – or considerably – when you start to write.

Often the most extensively planned essays are the most mechanistic and dull in execution, precisely because the writer has drawn up a plan and refused to deviate from it. What  is a more valuable skill is to be able to sense when your argument may be starting to go off-topic, or your point is getting out of hand,  as you write . (For help on this, see point 5 below.)

We might even say that when it comes to knowing how to write a good English Literature essay,  practising  is more important than planning.

2. Make room for close analysis of the text, or texts.

Whilst it’s true that some first-class or A-grade essays will be impressive without containing any close reading as such, most of the highest-scoring and most sophisticated essays tend to zoom in on the text and examine its language and imagery closely in the course of the argument. (Close reading of literary texts arises from theology and the analysis of holy scripture, but really became a ‘thing’ in literary criticism in the early twentieth century, when T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, William Empson, and other influential essayists started to subject the poem or novel to close scrutiny.)

Close reading has two distinct advantages: it increases the specificity of your argument (so you can’t be so easily accused of generalising a point), and it improves your chances of pointing up something about the text which none of the other essays your marker is reading will have said. For instance, take In Memoriam  (1850), which is a long Victorian poem by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson about his grief following the death of his close friend, Arthur Hallam, in the early 1830s.

When answering a question about the representation of religious faith in Tennyson’s poem  In Memoriam  (1850), how might you write a particularly brilliant essay about this theme? Anyone can make a general point about the poet’s crisis of faith; but to look closely at the language used gives you the chance to show  how the poet portrays this.

For instance, consider this stanza, which conveys the poet’s doubt:

A solid and perfectly competent essay might cite this stanza in support of the claim that Tennyson is finding it increasingly difficult to have faith in God (following the untimely and senseless death of his friend, Arthur Hallam). But there are several ways of then doing something more with it. For instance, you might get close to the poem’s imagery, and show how Tennyson conveys this idea, through the image of the ‘altar-stairs’ associated with religious worship and the idea of the stairs leading ‘thro’ darkness’ towards God.

In other words, Tennyson sees faith as a matter of groping through the darkness, trusting in God without having evidence that he is there. If you like, it’s a matter of ‘blind faith’. That would be a good reading. Now, here’s how to make a good English essay on this subject even better: one might look at how the word ‘falter’ – which encapsulates Tennyson’s stumbling faith – disperses into ‘falling’ and ‘altar’ in the succeeding lines. The word ‘falter’, we might say, itself falters or falls apart.

That is doing more than just interpreting the words: it’s being a highly careful reader of the poetry and showing how attentive to the language of the poetry you can be – all the while answering the question, about how the poem portrays the idea of faith. So, read and then reread the text you’re writing about – and be sensitive to such nuances of language and style.

The best way to  become attuned to such nuances is revealed in point 5. We might summarise this point as follows: when it comes to knowing how to write a persuasive English Literature essay, it’s one thing to have a broad and overarching argument, but don’t be afraid to use the  microscope as well as the telescope.

3. Provide several pieces of evidence where possible.

Many essays have a point to make and make it, tacking on a single piece of evidence from the text (or from beyond the text, e.g. a critical, historical, or biographical source) in the hope that this will be enough to make the point convincing.

‘State, quote, explain’ is the Holy Trinity of the Paragraph for many. What’s wrong with it? For one thing, this approach is too formulaic and basic for many arguments. Is one quotation enough to support a point? It’s often a matter of degree, and although one piece of evidence is better than none, two or three pieces will be even more persuasive.

After all, in a court of law a single eyewitness account won’t be enough to convict the accused of the crime, and even a confession from the accused would carry more weight if it comes supported by other, objective evidence (e.g. DNA, fingerprints, and so on).

Let’s go back to the example about Tennyson’s faith in his poem  In Memoriam  mentioned above. Perhaps you don’t find the end of the poem convincing – when the poet claims to have rediscovered his Christian faith and to have overcome his grief at the loss of his friend.

You can find examples from the end of the poem to suggest your reading of the poet’s insincerity may have validity, but looking at sources beyond the poem – e.g. a good edition of the text, which will contain biographical and critical information – may help you to find a clinching piece of evidence to support your reading.

And, sure enough, Tennyson is reported to have said of  In Memoriam : ‘It’s too hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself.’ And there we have it: much more convincing than simply positing your reading of the poem with a few ambiguous quotations from the poem itself.

Of course, this rule also works in reverse: if you want to argue, for instance, that T. S. Eliot’s  The Waste Land is overwhelmingly inspired by the poet’s unhappy marriage to his first wife, then using a decent biographical source makes sense – but if you didn’t show evidence for this idea from the poem itself (see point 2), all you’ve got is a vague, general link between the poet’s life and his work.

Show  how the poet’s marriage is reflected in the work, e.g. through men and women’s relationships throughout the poem being shown as empty, soulless, and unhappy. In other words, when setting out to write a good English essay about any text, don’t be afraid to  pile on  the evidence – though be sensible, a handful of quotations or examples should be more than enough to make your point convincing.

4. Avoid tentative or speculative phrasing.

Many essays tend to suffer from the above problem of a lack of evidence, so the point fails to convince. This has a knock-on effect: often the student making the point doesn’t sound especially convinced by it either. This leaks out in the telling use of, and reliance on, certain uncertain  phrases: ‘Tennyson might have’ or ‘perhaps Harper Lee wrote this to portray’ or ‘it can be argued that’.

An English university professor used to write in the margins of an essay which used this last phrase, ‘What  can’t be argued?’

This is a fair criticism: anything can be argued (badly), but it depends on what evidence you can bring to bear on it (point 3) as to whether it will be a persuasive argument. (Arguing that the plays of Shakespeare were written by a Martian who came down to Earth and ingratiated himself with the world of Elizabethan theatre is a theory that can be argued, though few would take it seriously. We wish we could say ‘none’, but that’s a story for another day.)

Many essay-writers, because they’re aware that texts are often open-ended and invite multiple interpretations (as almost all great works of literature invariably do), think that writing ‘it can be argued’ acknowledges the text’s rich layering of meaning and is therefore valid.

Whilst this is certainly a fact – texts are open-ended and can be read in wildly different ways – the phrase ‘it can be argued’ is best used sparingly if at all. It should be taken as true that your interpretation is, at bottom, probably unprovable. What would it mean to ‘prove’ a reading as correct, anyway? Because you found evidence that the author intended the same thing as you’ve argued of their text? Tennyson wrote in a letter, ‘I wrote In Memoriam  because…’?

But the author might have lied about it (e.g. in an attempt to dissuade people from looking too much into their private life), or they might have changed their mind (to go back to the example of  The Waste Land : T. S. Eliot championed the idea of poetic impersonality in an essay of 1919, but years later he described  The Waste Land as ‘only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life’ – hardly impersonal, then).

Texts – and their writers – can often be contradictory, or cagey about their meaning. But we as critics have to act responsibly when writing about literary texts in any good English essay or exam answer. We need to argue honestly, and sincerely – and not use what Wikipedia calls ‘weasel words’ or hedging expressions.

So, if nothing is utterly provable, all that remains is to make the strongest possible case you can with the evidence available. You do this, not only through marshalling the evidence in an effective way, but by writing in a confident voice when making your case. Fundamentally, ‘There is evidence to suggest that’ says more or less the same thing as ‘It can be argued’, but it foregrounds the  evidence rather than the argument, so is preferable as a phrase.

This point might be summarised by saying: the best way to write a good English Literature essay is to be honest about the reading you’re putting forward, so you can be confident in your interpretation and use clear, bold language. (‘Bold’ is good, but don’t get too cocky, of course…)

5. Read the work of other critics.

This might be viewed as the Holy Grail of good essay-writing tips, since it is perhaps the single most effective way to improve your own writing. Even if you’re writing an essay as part of school coursework rather than a university degree, and don’t need to research other critics for your essay, it’s worth finding a good writer of literary criticism and reading their work. Why is this worth doing?

Published criticism has at least one thing in its favour, at least if it’s published by an academic press or has appeared in an academic journal, and that is that it’s most probably been peer-reviewed, meaning that other academics have read it, closely studied its argument, checked it for errors or inaccuracies, and helped to ensure that it is expressed in a fluent, clear, and effective way.

If you’re serious about finding out how to write a better English essay, then you need to study how successful writers in the genre do it. And essay-writing is a genre, the same as novel-writing or poetry. But why will reading criticism help you? Because the critics you read can show you how to do all of the above: how to present a close reading of a poem, how to advance an argument that is not speculative or tentative yet not over-confident, how to use evidence from the text to make your argument more persuasive.

And, the more you read of other critics – a page a night, say, over a few months – the better you’ll get. It’s like textual osmosis: a little bit of their style will rub off on you, and every writer learns by the examples of other writers.

As T. S. Eliot himself said, ‘The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad.’ Don’t get precious about your own distinctive writing style and become afraid you’ll lose it. You can’t  gain a truly original style before you’ve looked at other people’s and worked out what you like and what you can ‘steal’ for your own ends.

We say ‘steal’, but this is not the same as saying that plagiarism is okay, of course. But consider this example. You read an accessible book on Shakespeare’s language and the author makes a point about rhymes in Shakespeare. When you’re working on your essay on the poetry of Christina Rossetti, you notice a similar use of rhyme, and remember the point made by the Shakespeare critic.

This is not plagiarising a point but applying it independently to another writer. It shows independent interpretive skills and an ability to understand and apply what you have read. This is another of the advantages of reading critics, so this would be our final piece of advice for learning how to write a good English essay: find a critic whose style you like, and study their craft.

If you’re looking for suggestions, we can recommend a few favourites: Christopher Ricks, whose  The Force of Poetry is a tour de force; Jonathan Bate, whose  The Genius of Shakespeare , although written for a general rather than academic audience, is written by a leading Shakespeare scholar and academic; and Helen Gardner, whose  The Art of T. S. Eliot , whilst dated (it came out in 1949), is a wonderfully lucid and articulate analysis of Eliot’s poetry.

James Wood’s How Fiction Works  is also a fine example of lucid prose and how to close-read literary texts. Doubtless readers of  Interesting Literature will have their own favourites to suggest in the comments, so do check those out, as these are just three personal favourites. What’s your favourite work of literary scholarship/criticism? Suggestions please.

Much of all this may strike you as common sense, but even the most commonsensical advice can go out of your mind when you have a piece of coursework to write, or an exam to revise for. We hope these suggestions help to remind you of some of the key tenets of good essay-writing practice – though remember, these aren’t so much commandments as recommendations. No one can ‘tell’ you how to write a good English Literature essay as such.

But it can be learned. And remember, be interesting – find the things in the poems or plays or novels which really ignite your enthusiasm. As John Mortimer said, ‘The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.’

Finally, good luck – and happy writing!

And if you enjoyed these tips for how to write a persuasive English essay, check out our advice for how to remember things for exams  and our tips for becoming a better close reader of poetry .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

30 thoughts on “How to Write a Good English Literature Essay”

You must have taken AP Literature. I’m always saying these same points to my students.

I also think a crucial part of excellent essay writing that too many students do not realize is that not every point or interpretation needs to be addressed. When offered the chance to write your interpretation of a work of literature, it is important to note that there of course are many but your essay should choose one and focus evidence on this one view rather than attempting to include all views and evidence to back up each view.

Reblogged this on SocioTech'nowledge .

Not a bad effort…not at all! (Did you intend “subject” instead of “object” in numbered paragraph two, line seven?”

Oops! I did indeed – many thanks for spotting. Duly corrected ;)

That’s what comes of writing about philosophy and the subject/object for another post at the same time!

Reblogged this on Scribing English .

• Pingback: Recommended Resource: Interesting Literature.com & how to write an essay | Write Out Loud

Great post on essay writing! I’ve shared a post about this and about the blog site in general which you can look at here: http://writeoutloudblog.com/2015/01/13/recommended-resource-interesting-literature-com-how-to-write-an-essay/

All of these are very good points – especially I like 2 and 5. I’d like to read the essay on the Martian who wrote Shakespeare’s plays).

Reblogged this on Uniqely Mustered and commented: Dedicate this to all upcoming writers and lovers of Writing!

I shall take this as my New Year boost in Writing Essays. Please try to visit often for corrections,advise and criticisms.

Reblogged this on Blue Banana Bread .

Reblogged this on worldsinthenet .

All very good points, but numbers 2 and 4 are especially interesting.

• Pingback: Weekly Digest | Alpha Female, Mainstream Cat

Reblogged this on rainniewu .

Reblogged this on pixcdrinks .

• Pingback: How to Write a Good English Essay? Interesting Literature | EngLL.Com

Great post. Interesting infographic how to write an argumentative essay http://www.essay-profy.com/blog/how-to-write-an-essay-writing-an-argumentative-essay/

Reblogged this on DISTINCT CHARACTER and commented: Good Tips

Reblogged this on quirkywritingcorner and commented: This could be applied to novel or short story writing as well.

Reblogged this on rosetech67 and commented: Useful, albeit maybe a bit late for me :-)

• Pingback: How to Write a Good English Essay | georg28ang

such a nice pieace of content you shared in this write up about “How to Write a Good English Essay” going to share on another useful resource that is

• Pingback: Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: How to Remember Things for Exams | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: Michael Moorcock: How to Write a Novel in 3 Days | Interesting Literature
• Pingback: Shakespeare and the Essay | Interesting Literature

A well rounded summary on all steps to keep in mind while starting on writing. There are many new avenues available though. Benefit from the writing options of the 21st century from here, i loved it! http://authenticwritingservices.com

• Pingback: Mark Twain’s Rules for Good Writing | Peacejusticelove's Blog

Comments are closed.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

How to do a Video Essay: The Video Essay Process

• Plan, Prepare & Create

Storyboarding

• Finding, Filming & Editing
• References & Credits
• The Video Essay Process

This section will give an introductory overview of the stages required to create a video essay.  Video essayers advice is to start simple and work through each stage of the video production process. Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

Identify what is your argument? What is it that you want to communicate to the viewer? Write this down in a few sentences, refer and modify it as required.

Watch Video Essays

Watch a selection of video essays, read blogs and web pages from video essayers and decide what type of video essay you would like to create. Start simple.

A storyboard is a detailed outline (similar to an outline in a written essay) that helps you to organise and visualise the video essay as to what is on the screen, text, media, message and transitions between shots.

Storyboards assist in determining the length, message and meaning of the video essay and help save time with editing and post production processes.

• Free Storyboard Templates

Collect & Edit

Collect video material as downloads, ripping DVDs, screen grabs, mobile phone footage and create voice-overs. Use research skills to find information and statements to support your argument. Maintain a standard of quality and manage your videos by naming conventions and storage.

Use editing software and experiment with available functionality to enhance and support your argument. Add a voice-over, sound effects, music and other aspects of multimodality. Be sure to include references and credits to all sources used in creating the video essay.

Revisit elements of your video essay and modify as required.

Visit the Resources page of this guide for more.

• Where to find video and how to capture it
• Video Editing Basics - iMovie
• Software Guides

References & Credits

References to cite sources used in the Video Essay. Referencing is a formal, systematic way of acknowledging sources that you have used in your video essay. It is imperative that you reference all sources used (including videos, stills, music, sfx) and apply the correct formatting so that references cited can be easily traced. The referencing style used at ECU is the APA style, 6th ed. 2010. Refer to the ECU Referencing Library Guide for accurate citation in APA style.

Production credits Individuals: acknowledgement of individuals and their role in the production. Purpose: A statement for internal use, e.g. “This video was produced for [course name] at [institution’s name] in [semester, year]”

• Referencing Library Guide
• << Previous: What is a Video Essay?
• Next: Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies >>
• What is a Video Essay?
• Modes, MultiModality & Multiliteracies
• A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies
• Modes Of Multimodality
• Video Essay Journals
• Video Essay Channels
• Weblinks to Video Essay Resources
• Weblinks to Creative Commons Resources
• Titles in the Library
• Referencing & Copyright
• Marking Rubric
• Last Updated: Aug 28, 2023 2:57 PM
• URL: https://ecu.au.libguides.com/video-essay

Edith Cowan University acknowledges and respects the Noongar people, who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which its campuses stand and its programs operate. In particular ECU pays its respects to the Elders, past and present, of the Noongar people, and embrace their culture, wisdom and knowledge.

• Our Mission

Creating Videos to Explore Literary Analysis

Making a short video can be a powerful opportunity for students to explore a reading in a different way from writing an essay.

As an English teacher, one of my first go-to processes when watching a film, even at home for recreation, is digging into the mise-en-scène, or the arrangement of objects and elements onscreen. While considering films this way helps my reader’s brain build analysis, I’m always thinking about steps that help link the processes of reading, writing, and creating. Implementing these steps with my students helps me to know how they think about texts and is also a way for me to learn more about them.

This use of mise-en-scène as a close “reading” step is one way to remind students that everything that appears in a shot for a film or television series (or even TikTok video) is likely there for some purpose. This is true even of still images. By showcasing intentional author and director choices, teachers can activate the writing mind in a variety of ways, which I’ll explain.

Change the Format for Responses to Readings

Rather than write the second or third essay, sometimes I like to let students choose different ways to engage with a reading. This was a practice I used with reading The Catcher in the Rye , in which students responded to the book in groups based on a rubric I shared . When faced with the blank page, sometimes students experience anxiety, but having the opportunity to get up, plan a scene, and talk with peers can help break the ice and inspire thinking processes.

With the design of the rubric, I’m still asking students to create a product that examines the content I’m after, with the additional benefit of the skill building that digital creation allows.

Whether it’s through reenacting a scene somewhere at school or planning a response to sum up thinking about a class reading or concept, film can offer some variety in the ways that students share and present projects. Using film in this way also meets secondary English language arts standards for collaborating and composing using digital and electronic tools—social media apps, YouTube, and laptop cameras. I recommend WeVideo and Adobe tools , which are helpful and specific tools for creating both videos and podcasts.

Students also employ traditional writing methods for scripting what will occur in the videoed exchange. This rough sketch is turned in as part of the process and product . In the past, I’ve also used storyboarding as a method for envisioning written and filmed stories ( Canva has useful resources for this).

Try Zeitgeist Poems

As a reader who appreciates poetry and visual forms, I’m often drawn to the ways that YouTube creators share readings of poems paired with images. In some cases, authors share videos of their own poems. In my class, zeitgeist poems are another Catcher -related activity, resulting in brief, two-to-three-minute recorded responses. This has served as a prereading exercise to think about the idea of a zeitgeist, expanding vocabulary instruction and setting an initial purpose and interest in reading.

The process began with an invitation to write on the page, which then became a multimodal exercise in locating images that paired with and emphasized the words that students chose and arranged to convey the feelings of time, especially related to my students’ experience of the world in 2022. Given their life during the pandemic, there was much to unpack.

As with other video products, students collaborated and explored tools based in social media to create reenactments and do voice-overs for still images. These elements were then combined through the video-editing methods within the platforms the students used. When video is used with the poetic form, imagery is arguably emphasized all the more—an important step for students who may have trouble with visualizing.

Assign Community Video Essays

Finally, I’ve used videos to help students think about poetry and culture, including filmed walk-throughs of projects that they’ve created and written about in response to units of study. Sometimes, students are hesitant to present to a class in real time, but the opportunity to record themselves individually or collaboratively (expanding on learning and presenting about a product they’ve created) can be a more invitational method. This approach also gives students added practice in film editing and media recording techniques that move beyond the slide creation that is common in many of my presentation assignments.

In partnership with fellow teachers, we developed a series of lesson steps that drew upon a unit of study in multicultural literature to help students explore community ideals and engage in problem-solving. This series of lesson steps involved groups deciding how to form a community charter, design their government, and deal with issues that arose within a hypothetical community. Students designed their communities on paper and then used found materials to compose elements of these plans. 

Creating physical objects was an engaging exercise in engineering and creativity, giving my students the chance to use spare objects around the classroom space to create three-dimensional blueprints for community models. Students also drafted their initial ideas for the communities on paper and talked through them in small groups with teacher guidance.

The film they created served as a final reflection and presentation step, as students gave guided tours of their communities. They discussed the values that they wanted to emphasize, their decision-making process when faced with issues, and how they redesigned elements of their communities in response to those challenges. I discovered that students who might have shied away from a presentation at the front of the room in traditional speech format were often more comfortable with the take/retake nature of the short film.

Embrace Usefulness, Novelty, and Accessibility

Although I include writing in class daily, it’s sometimes a nice change of pace and a chance for novelty to invite students to film responses, rather than always jotting ideas in the same modes. Additionally, and perhaps more important, utilizing media this way allows me to reach standards and teach aspects of the composing process that would otherwise be difficult to address. As a teacher who is occasionally cast in student-created TikTok videos, I also understand the pull of media and the accessibility that students enjoy for creating short films.

• Jul 31, 2022

The Rise of Video Essays

The daunting five-paragraph essays assigned in secondary school have created a sense of dread amongst most students, as they engage with the challenge of organizing their ideas and effectively guiding a reader through their arguments. In fact, many face the dilemma of articulating and knowing what they want to say. Yet, what has become the burden of both secondary and higher education students has softened in its perception by reason of the rise in video essays, primarily published and distributed on YouTube. Video essays present several advantages compared to traditional essays. There is undeniable potential for video essays to circulate important information and allow for ways to express critical thought. Though the two types of essays resemble one another in structure and narrative, the multimodal characteristics of a video essay establish it as a new way of composing and presenting the contents as opposed to a traditional essay.

Fundamentally, every essay contains three fundamental parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. The body has a sequence of ideas with transitions and then unites and restates the main message (or thesis) at the end. An argument cannot be told effectively without an established definition and explanation for the reason an argument is made. After all, readers, viewers, or listeners first need to be interested in the main idea before spending their attention capital. Doug Specht (2019), a Director of Teaching and Learning, School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, also emphasizes the need for essays, both written and visual, to remain similar in structure and in how they are outlined: “You will still need to define the thesis, the main point of the argument. You will still need to plan the shape of your argument, and the essay shapes can be adapted to audio or visual essays too” (p. 87) Afterall, if a film, YouTube video, essay, novel, and the like do not have a solid purpose for existing, it does not help nor impact the audience.

Additionally, these essential messaging components exist in any medium with a narrative or story, but it must be pointed out that the terms narrative and story have slightly different definitions. According to Merriam Webster, a story is “An account of incidents or events” (2022b), and a narrative is “A way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values” (2022a). Clearly, a story, whether true or fictional, gives a general description of what is happening. Conversely, a narrative is a way in which that description is told. Therefore, written or visual essays do not merely recall connected events, but rather develop a solid thesis supported by relevant research. An effective narrative runs like a thread throughout the essay to keep the readers linear with the argument and its supporting points. Traditional essays achieve narrative through rhetorical strategies and an author's written persona and tone. Video essays use essay content and adapt it to several cinematic techniques similar to documentaries, but on a much smaller scale, especially for novices with low budgets.

Before any writing, filming, or recording of any kind can take place, an outline should be established to materialize the jumbled flow of ideas and map them into a cohesive narrative. One should have a performative approach to outlining video essays because, unlike written essays, the work must be spoken aloud accompanied by other visual effects. Süleyman Kıvanç Türkgeldi (2021), an Assistant Professor specializing in Communication and Performance and Visual Arts at Cukurova University, calls video essays themselves performative research:

These forms of expression belong to a plane that cannot be expressed with numerical data but transmitted through symbolic data (moving / still image, sound, and music forms, etc.) outside the boundaries of language (p. 821).

Thus, a divergence in how to approach a traditional and video essay becomes clearer, and the advantages of video essays are shifting how people entertainingly receive information.

One major advantage of video essays is that their multimodality draws in larger audiences. There is more opportunity for creative expression in the way the author presents research. Samantha Hines, a head librarian at Missoula College at the University of Montana, wrote an article on multimodal literacy and accepted the following definition offered by Sean Cordes: “Multimodal literacy can be said to have a cultural literacy component that goes beyond the established information literacy standards” (as cited in Hines, 2014, p. 14). The prefix “multi” already predisposes the multitude of ways or “modes” of information and distribution and how it contributes to the literacy skills of the audience. Those who struggle to conceptualize and comprehend traditional text greatly benefit from other modalities such as pictures, audio, and video effects.

In addition to the medium, one cannot discount the power of the creator in video essays and the relationship with the viewer. Hines (2014) highlights social media’s role in instantly distributing video essays at a faster rate than traditional ones: “Users need to focus on more than who created content, but also who passed it along and how they interacted with or perhaps even altered it” (p. 14). An audience of a video essay may come across a video essay it through YouTube recommendations or online communities that share that video. The influence of their video essays is perpetuated by a coalesced community surrounding a video essayist because of a seemingly closer relationship that the viewers have with the author. There is a direct dialogue with an audience via comment sections and forums that traditional essays do not have. J. Degenhard, an analyst covering key market indicators for Statista, reported that in 2021 approximately 2,240.03 million users spent time on YouTube (2021). While not every video will hit an algorithm that spreads it to millions of these users, the accessibility and ease of sharing make content much more promising.

Equally important, the added visual aids and moving motions of the video essay have long appealed to the human need for expression through pictures. The earliest depictions of written language were through pictographs. Additionally, Ruth M. Van Dyk (2006), a professor of anthropology at Binghamton University, recalls another example of visual media in archeology:

In archeology, as in any discipline, visual representations are integral to the production of knowledge and scholarly authority. The map, for example, is perhaps the most singularly useful item in any site report (p. 370).

It could be said that essays are a kind of map that directs the reader through the author, director, or presenter’s inner thoughts and arguments. In congruence with communities surrounding a particular creator of video essays, one can make quite a significant impact on the audience's own perception or education of an issue or topic through video essays. Jacquelyn S. Kibbey (2011), a professor at UNY Oswego Graduate Studies, argued visual literacy continues to be a desirable way to educate people in our increasingly multimedia world:

Visual literacy teaches us how to see, communicate, and understand through visual means. Advertisers and marketers understand how to reach their audience far better than educators. Why shouldn’t teachers enlist those same methods? (p. 51).

Online essayists on social media can have quite an influence. Thus, educators and those who are knowledgeable in certain areas should not underestimate the sway of video essays.

Furthermore, the ways of expression consistently change within new technologies. Writers learning other ways to adapt their craft to suit other performance mediums has existed as long as humans performed plays and gave public speeches. Therefore, writers learning how to hone their craft and adapt it to other media is not new. In Sarah Levine and Johanna (Jones) Franzel’s (2015) discussions on teaching how to write scripts for radio is explored. In fact, they state that:

When radio audiences tune in to listen to a story, they have no pictures to look at and no written text to track. So when students write for radio, they must create specific, concrete images to paint a picture, strong verbs to communicate action … because they are speaking their ideas aloud, they must attend more carefully to whether their words actually make sense (p. 21).

Video essays have the advantage of video and pictures, whereas radio does not. However, a solid narration is still essential for most video essays, whether it’s a voice-over or the creators film themselves physically. Nevertheless, writers must compose a script that will sound intelligent but is not afraid to deviate from an academic tone and use humor and colloquialisms instead. Users on social media desire information and education, but many users also appreciate some personal examples from the essayist or offhanded remarks on the content before returning to the main point.

Moreover, video essays produced on YouTube not only bring a unique method of expressing ideas, but the topics can cover a variety of relevant, pop-culture topics that one may not see in traditional academia. While some video essays may provide analysis of highly academic subjects, most video essays can also cover recent national or international news and trending discourse in niche communities on social platforms. These examples are then analyzed or commented on through critical lenses related to economics, history, race, sociology, gender, and more. Patricia G. Lange (2019), an anthropologist and associate professor of critical studies at the California College of the Arts, describes the participative atmosphere of YouTube: “Revisions to the scholarly record show that people engaging with mass media did not simply absorb media messages without active interpretations” (p. 37). And this engagement is a good thing because even participation in seemingly silly topics can motivate everyone to critically analyze the information they receive. YouTube’s accessibility allows anyone to produce a video essay, including those without any higher education background. Even professionals in various fields now utilize the platform to produce intriguing content.

In the end, video essays are another method of performance, and can offer quite insightful perspectives in an entertaining method. Ric Allsopp (1999), a current guest Professor in the MA SODA program at the Inter-University Centre for Dance, identified digital media’s influence on performance art:

Whatever the ambivalent indications of digital media, writing will certainly continue to develop as a technological medium, and as such, as performance-performance (in whatever form) will continue to be an increasingly complex interaction of signifying systems (p.76).

In other words, writing shapes the performance, and technology grants diverse manners in which to perform. The video essay, as stated previously by Süleyman Kıvanç Türkgeldi, is the performance of research, brought to life not only through visual effects but even through the persona put forth by the digital essayist.

Bibliographical References

Allsopp, R. (1999). Performance Writing. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art , 21 (1), 76–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/3245984

Degenhard, J. (2021). Youtube users in the World 2017–2025 . Statista. https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1144088/youtube-users-in-the-world

Hines, S. (2014). Multimodal literacy and why it matters: a brief overview. Against the Grain , 26 (4), 14–16. https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176x.6902

Kibbey, J. S. (2011). Chapter four: media literacy and social justice in a visual world. Counterpoints , 403 , 50–61. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42981595

Lange, P. G. (2019). Youtube initiation: participating through a camera. in thanks for watching: an anthropological study of video sharing on youtube (pp. 32–68). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2g5915d.5

Levine, S., & Franzel, J. (Jones). (2015). Teaching Writing with Radio. The English Journal, 104(5), 21–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24484576

Specht, D. (2019). Writing: getting started. In The Media and Communications Study Skills Student Guide (pp. 69–88). University of Westminster Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11cvxcf.9

Türkgeldi̇, S. (2021). Thinking of video essays as a performative research with a new concept: transimage. SineFilozofi , 812–825. https://doi.org/10.31122/sinefilozofi.823234

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (2022). narrative . https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/narrative#:%7E:text=Definition%20of%20narrative%20 (Entry%202,style%20the%20novel’s%20narrative%20structure

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (2022b). story . https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/story

Van Dyke, R. M. (2006). Seeing the past: visual media in archaeology. American Anthropologist , 108 (2), 370–375. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3804798

Visual References

Figure 1: Silveira, E. (2019). UOL TAB [Illustration]. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/82467245/UOL-TAB?tracking_source=search_projects%7Cyoutube

Figure 2: Vogel, J. (2020). Media Temple 2 [Illustration]. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/100244905/Media-Temple-2/modules/578308925

Figure 3: Silveira, E. (2019). UOL TAB [Illustration]. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/82467245/UOL-TAB?tracking_source=search_projects%7Cyoutube

Figure 4: Hamazaki, K. (2018). Wifi Society [Illustration]. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/70844581/Wifi-Society?tracking_source=search_projects%7Ccomputer

Figure 5: Franchi, M. (2020). Microsoft x Surface [Illustration]. Behance. https://www.behance.net/gallery/87835469/Microsoft-x-Surface/modules/508045167

I always wrote all student work myself, it was not difficult for me and it did not bring difficulties, this time I came across a very difficult subject. I studied it all semester, passed everything on time, but then the time came for the session and I just gave up, I decided that I would turn to the professionals at https://payforessay.net/ and they would write all the assignments for me. They completed everything quickly, efficiently, took into account all my wishes and I am incredibly happy about this, because I passed the test on time and now I can sleep peacefully.

Dive into the transformative world of creativity with Reddy Anna's groundbreaking book. Learn how to harness the boundless potential of your imagination and unleash it to achieve your dreams. With insightful guidance and practical exercises, Reddy Anna  inspires readers to embrace their creativity and overcome any obstacles in their path. Whether you're an aspiring artist, entrepreneur, or simply seeking to reignite your passion, this book is your key to unlocking new possibilities. Join the movement and embark on a journey of self-discovery and innovation today. Whether you're striving for professional excellence, personal development, or both, reddyannabooks. net is here to support you every step of the way.

SlotsCity is an immersive online casino https://slotscity.com/ experience that takes you on a thrilling journey through a vibrant city filled with endless entertainment. With an impressive selection of slot games from top providers, this site guarantees non-stop excitement for all players. From classic fruit machines to cutting-edge video slots, there's something here to suit every taste and preference. The user-friendly interface and seamless gameplay make it easy to navigate and enjoy the adrenaline-pumping action. Offering generous bonuses, secure transactions, and responsive customer support, SlotsCity is the ultimate destination for both seasoned players and newcomers seeking an unforgettable gambling adventure. Get ready to spin and win in this virtual city of endless possibilities!

An essay is a written piece of work that presents a writer's perspective, arguments, analysis, or opinions on a specific topic. It usually follows a structured format with an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Essays can serve various https://www.nursingpaper.com/examples/orems-self-care-model-essay/ purposes, such as informing, persuading, entertaining, or reflecting. They are commonly assigned in academic settings to assess a student's critical thinking, writing skills, and understanding of the subject matter.

Leah Dietle

Arcadia, has many categories starting from Literature to Science. If you liked this article and would like to read more, you can subscribe from below or click the bar and discover unique more  experiences  in our articles in many categories

Let the posts come to you.

Thanks for submitting!

Anthony Cockerill

| Writing | The written word | Teaching English |

How to write great English literature essays at university

Essential advice on how to craft a great english literature essay at university – and how to avoid rookie mistakes..

If you’ve just begun to study English literature at university, the prospect of writing that first essay can be daunting. Tutors will likely offer little in the way of assistance in the process of planning and writing, as it’s assumed that students know how to do this already. At A-level, teachers are usually very clear with students about the Assessment Objectives for examination components and centre-assessed work, but it can feel like there’s far less clarity around how essays are marked at university. Furthermore, the process of learning how to properly reference an essay can be a steep learning curve.

But essentially, there are five things you’re being asked to do: show your understanding of the text and its key themes, explore the writer’s methods, consider the influence of contextual factors that might influence the writing and reading of the text, read published critical work about the text and incorporate this discourse into your essay, and finally, write a coherent argument in response to the task.

With advice from English teachers, HE tutors and other people who’ve been there and done it, here are the most crucial things to remember when planning and writing an essay.

Read around the subject and let your argument evolve.

‘One of the big step-ups from A-level, where students might only have had to deal with critical material as part of their coursework, is the move toward engaging with the critical debate around a text.’

Reading around the task and making notes is all important. Get familiar with the reading list. Become adept at searching for critical material in books and articles that’s not on the reading list. Talk with the librarian. Make sure you can find your way around the stacks. Get log-ins for the various databases of online criticism, such as the MLA International Bibliography .

‘Tutors are looking for flair… for students to be nuanced and creative with their ideas as opposed to reproducing the same criticism that others already have.’

When reading, keep notes, make summaries and write down useful quotations. Make sure you keep track of what you’ve read as you go. Note the publication details (author, publisher, year and place of publication). If you write down a quotation, note the page number. This will make dealing with citations and writing your bibliography much easier later on, as there’s nothing more annoying than getting to the end of the first draft of your essay and realising you’ve no idea which book or article a quote came from or which page it was on.

‘The more I read, the sharper my own writing style became because I developed an opinion of the writing style I liked and I had a clear sense of the subject matter that I was discussing.’

‘Don’t wing the reading. Or the thinking. Crap writing emerges from style over substance.’

Get to grips with the question and plan a response.

‘Brain dump at the start in the form of a mind map. This will help you focus and relax. You can add to it as go along and can shape it into a brief plan.’

Before writing a single word, brainstorm. Do some free-thinking. Get your ideas down on paper or sticky notes. Cross things out; refine. Allow your planning to be led by ideas that support your argument.

Use different colour-coded sticky notes for your planning. In the example below, the student has used yellow sticky notes for ideas, blue for language, structure and methods, purple for context and green for literary criticism, which makes planning the sequence of the essay much easier.

Structure and sequence your ideas

‘Make your argument clear in your opening paragraph, and then ensure that every subsequent paragraph is clearly addressing your thesis.’

Plan the essay by working out a sequence of your ideas that you believe to be the most compelling. Allow your ideas to serve as structural signposts. Augment these with relevant criticism, context and focus on language and style.

‘Read wide and look at different pieces of criticism of a particular work and weave that in with your own interpretation of said work.’

Write a great introduction.

‘By the end of the first paragraph, make sure you have established a very clear thesis statement that outlines the main thrust of the essay.’

Your introduction should make your argument very clear. It’s also a chance to establish working definitions of any problematic terms and to engage with key aspects of the wider critical debate.

Get to grips with academic style and draft the essay

‘[Write with] an ‘exploratory’ tone rather than ‘dogmatic’ one.’

Academic writing is characterised by argument, analysis and evaluation. In an earlier post , I explored how students in high school might improve their analytical writing by adopting three maxims. These maxims are just as helpful for undergraduates. Firstly, aim for precise, cogent expression. Secondly, deliver an individual response supported by your reading – and citing – of published literary criticism. Thirdly, work on your personal voice. In formal analytical writing such as the university essay, your personal voice might be constrained rather more than it would be in a blog or a review, but it must nonetheless be exploratory in tone. Tentativity can be an asset as it suggests appreciation of nuances and alternative ways of thinking.

‘I got to grips with what was being asked of me by reading lots of literary criticism and becoming more familiar with academic writing conventions.’

Avoid unnecessary or clunky sign-post phrases such as ‘in this essay, I am going to…’ or ‘a further thing…’ A transition devices that can work really well is the explicit paragraph link, in which a motif or phrase in the last sentence of a paragraph is repeated in the first sentence of the next paragraph.

Write a killer conclusion

‘There is more emphasis on finding your own voice at university, something which in many ways is inhibited by Assessment Objectives at A-Level. I don’t think ‘good’ academic writing is necessarily taught very well in schools — at least from my experience.’

The conclusion is a really important part of your essay. It’s a chance to restate your thesis and to draw conclusions. You might achieve closure or instead, allude to interesting questions or ideas the essay has perhaps raised but not answered. You might synthesise your argument by exploring the key issue. You could zoom-out and explore the issue as part of a bigger picture.

Be meticulous in your referencing.

Having supported your argument with quotations from published critics, it’s important to be meticulous about how you reference these, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism – passing someone else’s work off as your own. There are three broad ways of referencing: author-date, footnote and endnote. However, within each of these three approaches, there are specific named protocols. Most English literature faculties use either the MLA (Modern Languages Association of America) style or the Harvard style (variants of the author-date approach). It’s important to check what your faculty or department uses, learn how to use it (faculties invariably publish guidance, but ask if you’re unsure) and apply the rules meticulously.

‘Read your work aloud, slowly, sentence by sentence. It’s the best way to spot typos, and it allows you to hear what is awkward and/or ungrammatical. Then read the essay aloud again.’

Write with precision. Use a thesaurus to help you find the right word, but make sure you use it properly and in the right context. Read sentences back and prune unnecessary phrases or redundant words. Similarly, avoid words or phrases which might sound self-important or pompous.

Like those structural signposts that don’t really add anything, some phrases need to be omited, such as ‘many people have argued that…’ or ‘futher to the previous paragraph…’.

Finally, make sure the essay is formatted correctly. University departments are usually clear about their expectations, but font, size, and line spacing are usually stipulated along with any other information you’re expected to include in the essay’s header or footer. And don’t expect the proofing tool to pick up every mistake.

Featured image by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• analytical writing

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Communications: Video Essay

• Ask for Help
• Find Journals and Articles
• Media Research
• Internet Media Sites
• General works
• Methodologies
• Media analysis
• Visual methods
• Topic-focused resources
• Online resources
• Ecomedia Research
• New York Times
• Find Videos
• Video Essay
• Find Images
• Find Audio Resources
• Comics Research
• Music Web Resources (from the Humanistic Studies Guide)
• CMS/PL 331: Media in the Arab World
• COM 210: Introduction to Cinema
• COM 220: Media, Culture and Society
• COM 221: Writing Across the Media
• DJRN 221: Introduction to News Reporting and Writing
• CMS 333: TV After TV
• CW/DJRN 346: Creative Writing Workshop: Travel Writing

What is a video essay?

A video essay is a short video that illustrates a topic, expresses an opinion and develops a thesis statement based on research through editing video, sound and image.

(Source: Morrissey, K. (2015, September). Stop Teaching Software, Start Teaching Software Literacy. Flowjournal . https://www.flowjournal.org/2015/09/stop-teaching-software-start-teaching-software-literacy/?print=print )

It is made of three main elements:

• Image (filmed footage and found footage)
• Sound (music and audio)
• Words (spoken and written)

All of them are linked to your own voice and argument. It is a way to write with video.

• Guidelines for Video Essay Best Practices Official technical guidelines by Prof. Antonio Lopez.

Video essays about video essays

Why Video Essays are just plain AWESOME by This Guy Edits  on YouTube .

Elements of the Essay Film from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo .

F for Fake (1973) – How to Structure a Video Essay from Tony Zhou on Vimeo .

Sample Video Essays

• If Educational Videos Were Filmed Like Music Videos by Tom Scott
• How to Use Color in Film A blog post with multiple video essays about the use of color palettes by multiple great directors.
• Seed, Image, Ground by Abelardo Gil-Fournier & Jussi Parikka.
• Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same
• Top Video Essayists some videos on this page are set to private
• VideoEssay: A subreddit for analytic videos and supercuts
• ISIL videos imitate Hollywood and video games to win converts
• Best Video Essays of 2023
• Best Video Essays of 2022 by British Film Institute
• Best Video Essays of 2020 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2019 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2018 by British Film Institute.
• Best Video Essays of 2017 by British Film Institute.
• Video Essays (Historical) A YouTube playlist of historically important films that helped define the concept of video essays.
• What Is Neorealism by kogonada.
• Analyzing Isis' propaganda - Mujatweets by Azza el Masri and Catherine Otayek.
• Oh dear! by Adam Curtis.
• Fembot in a Red Dress by Alison De Fren.
• WHY IS CINEMA: Women Filmmakers? NOT SEXIST, BUT LET'S BE REAL??? by Cameron Carpenter.
• Women as Reward - Tropes vs Women in Video Games by feministfrequency.
• Il corpo delle donne (sub eng) by Lorella Zanardo.

Video essays beyond COM

Video essays can be a valuable form of academic production, and they can be brilliant and insightful in many other fields apart from Communications and media studies. Here are some examples that cover all the JCU departments:

• Lady of Shalott | Art Analysis A look at John William Waterhouse's Pre-Raphaelite painting "The Lady of Shalott".
• How to ace your MBA video essay The 60-second online video essay is a recent addition to the MBA application process for some business schools.
• The Last Jedi - Forcing Change An analysis of Finn's and Kylo's narrative arc in Episode VIII of the Star Wars franchise.
• How The Economic Machine Works by Ray Dalio A simple but not simplistic and easy to follow 30 minute animated video that answers the question.
• Evolution of the Hero in British Literature This video essay discusses the literary heroes throughout the Anglo-Saxon Period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance Era in British Literature.
• Fast Math Tricks - How to multiply 2 digit numbers up to 100 - the fast way! An easy video tutorial unveiling some math tricks.
• Here's why we need to rethink veganism A brief climate change video essay on the environmental impacts of veganism, and how we can reframe going vegan less as a lifestyle and more as an aspiration.
• Italy on the edge of crisis: Should Europe be worried? Channel 4 discussing the delicate political juncture in Italy (May 2018).
• International Relations: An Introduction An overview by the London School of Economics and Social Science.

A video is basically a series of still images- each one is called a frame- that play back at a specific  rate . The frame rate (often abbreviated FPS for "frames per second") differs depending on where you are in the world and what you're shooting on.

If you're shooting a movie on celluloid (actual film that needs to be developed) then you are probably shooting at 24fps.

If you are shooting video in Europe then you are probably shooting at 25fps...

...unless you are shooting sports. Then you're probably shooting at 50fps.

If you're shooting video in the US or Canada then you are probably shooting at 30(29.98)fps...

...unless you're shooting sports. Then you're probably shooting at 60(59.98)fps...

...or unless you're shooting "cinematic video" at a frame rate of 23.976fps.

***The weird numbers for shooting in the US and Canada stem from the fact that while Europe's 50Hz electrical system operates at 50Hz, the 60Hz electrical system of the US actually operates at 59.98 Hz.***

If you're shooting at a higher frame rate (like 120fps or 250fps) it is probably because you want to play it back at one of these frame rates in order to achieve a slow motion effect.

Video sizes are measured in pixels. Resolution   refers to Width x Height. Here are some common resolutions:

• FullHD (1080p): 1920 x 1080
• HD (720p): 1280 x 720
• 4K (2160p): 3840 x 2160
• 4K Cinema: 4096 x 2160
• Standard Defintion (NTSC- US/Canada): 720 x 480
• Standard Definition (PAL- Europe): 720 x 576
• VGA: 640 x 360

Types of video essays

1. Supercut

A supercut is a compilation of a large number of (short) film clips, focusing on a common characteristic these clips have. That commonality can be anything: a formal or stylistic aspect, a shared theme or subject matter... 

Supercuts are a staple of fandom, but they can also be used as a form of audiovisual critique: to reveal cinematic tropes, to trace thematic or stylistic constants in a filmmaker’s work and so on.

Examples: ROYGBIV: A Pixar Supercut  or Microsoft Sam's  Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same  or Chloé Barreau's  NON UNA DI MENO - l'8 MARZO sta arrivando!

2. Voiceover based

In this form, analysis is done by combining clips and images with a narrator’s voice that guides the process. This could be done for a variety of video essays styles: scene breakdowns, shot analyses, structural analyses, vlogs, etc. What is common is the integral role of the creator’s voice in advancing the argument.

Example: Tony Zhou’s Jackie Chan—How to Do Action Comedy or David Chen’s Edgar Wright and the Art of Close-Ups .

3. Text/Image/Sound-Based

In this form, analysis is done by combining text, images and sounds without a narrator’s voice to guide the process. Again, this could be done for a variety of video essays styles, but relies much more on editing to advance the argument.

Example: Kevin B. Lee’s Elements of the Essay Film or Catherine Grant’s All That Pastiche Allows Redux .

4. Desktop Films

A desktop film uses the screen of a computer or gadget to serve as the camera and canvas for all of the content of an audiovisual narrative. It can include content from videos, apps, and programs that would be viewable on a screen. It is a screen-based experience that uses the desktop as its primary medium.

Example: Katja Jansen’s Desktop Films ; Kevin B. Lee’s Reading // Binging // Benning .

Descriptions adapted from  Filmscalpel

Resources: background and fundamentals

Best Practices

• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education Also downloadable as a PDF file
• Streaming: film criticism you can watch by Guy Lodge
• What is a Video Essay? Creators Grapple with a Definition Paula Bernstein from Filmmaker journal .
• The Video Essay As Art: 11 Ways to Make a Video Essay by Norman Bateman.
• Video essay: The essay film – some thoughts of discontent by Kevin B. Lee.
• Deep Focus - The Essay Film by British Film Institute and Sight & Sound .

Scholarly Websites about Video Essays

• The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy
• Audiovisualcy Video Essays on Vimeo.
• [In]Transition Journal of Videographic Films and Moving Image Studies.
• Introductory guide to video essay From the British Universities and Colleges Film and Video Council.

Resources: software and how-to

• How-to video essays by Greer Fyfe and Miriam Ross.
• Media Production Guide by Tisch Library, Tufts University.
• Video Reactions with OBS (Open Broadcast Software) Part 01 Setting up your scenes
• Video Reactions with OBS (Open Broadcast Software) Part 02 Recording with OBS

Storyboarding

• Planning and Storyboarding from Royal Roads University Library.
• Video Essay Script Template

Screencasting

• Quicktime (cross-platform)
• Screencast-O-Matic
• OBS Studio (open source, cross-platform) Open Broadcaster Software
• Flashback Express (PC only)
• 5 Free Tools for Creating a Screencast from Mashable.

Downloading and ripping

• Pasty Software for downloading.
• Savefrom allows up to 720p downloads of full video, 1080p downloads of video only (no audio). Select “download video in browser” on the site.
• Y2mate allows up to 1080p video downloads.
• Jdownloader Software for downloading
• Handbrake Software for ripping and converting
• DMA Basics: OBS for Video Essays A tutorial on how to use OBS for Netflix.

Note: Try to to ensure that you download in 720p resolution or higher. Your minimum level of quality should be 480p. If searching on YouTube, you can filter the search results to only show HD or 4K results. Check also the  Find Video   tab of this guide.

Free editing software options

• DaVinci Resolve (cross-platform) A color grading and non-linear video editing (NLE) application for macOS, Windows, and Linux, incorporating tools from Fairlight (audio production) and Fusion (motion graphics and visual effects that throw shade on After Effects).
• iMovie (Mac only)
• Videopad (cross-plaftorm)
• OpenShot (open source, cross-platform)
• Shortcut (open source, cross-platform)
• HitFilm Express (cross-platform)
• Free Music Archive An interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads directed by the radio station WFMU.
• SoundCloud SoundCloud is one of the world’s largest music and audio platform and you can search for creative commons music.
• YouTube Audio Library A library of free music and sound effects by YouTube. Each track is accompanied by information on the use.
• Sound Image Free music (and more) for your Projects by Eric Matyas. Only requires crediting the author for legal use (see "attribution info" page).
• Audacity A free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software. Very useful to trim audio, convert a sample rate, apply a little compression, chop & screw, etc.
• REAPER A digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer software. Technically a paid-for platform, its free-trial never ends.

Check also the  Find  Audio Resources  tab of this guide.

Creating credits, copyright and fair use

• Creating credits for video essays From Digital Design Studio at Tisch Library
• Fair Use Evaluator
• YouTube Fair Use Channel
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies Statement on Fair Use
• Blender A free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games.
• GIMP A free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
• Inkscape A free and open-source vector graphics editor used to create vector images, primarily in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format.
• Krita A free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation. Good for sketching and conceptual art.

Stock footage

For stock footage, please check under the  Find video tab of this guide.

• Final Cut Pro X Tutorial by JCU Digital Media Lab.
• Final Cut Pro X Tutorial (PDF)
• Final Cut Pro X Full Tutorial by David A. Cox
• Audio Recording Tutorial by JCU Digital Media Lab.
• << Previous: Find Videos
• Next: Find Images >>
• Last Updated: May 20, 2024 5:10 PM
• URL: https://johncabot.libguides.com/communications

beginner's guide to literary analysis

Understanding literature & how to write literary analysis.

Literary analysis is the foundation of every college and high school English class. Once you can comprehend written work and respond to it, the next step is to learn how to think critically and complexly about a work of literature in order to analyze its elements and establish ideas about its meaning.

If that sounds daunting, it shouldn’t. Literary analysis is really just a way of thinking creatively about what you read. The practice takes you beyond the storyline and into the motives behind it. 

While an author might have had a specific intention when they wrote their book, there’s still no right or wrong way to analyze a literary text—just your way. You can use literary theories, which act as “lenses” through which you can view a text. Or you can use your own creativity and critical thinking to identify a literary device or pattern in a text and weave that insight into your own argument about the text’s underlying meaning. 

Now, if that sounds fun, it should , because it is. Here, we’ll lay the groundwork for performing literary analysis, including when writing analytical essays, to help you read books like a critic. 

What Is Literary Analysis?

As the name suggests, literary analysis is an analysis of a work, whether that’s a novel, play, short story, or poem. Any analysis requires breaking the content into its component parts and then examining how those parts operate independently and as a whole. In literary analysis, those parts can be different devices and elements—such as plot, setting, themes, symbols, etcetera—as well as elements of style, like point of view or tone. 

When performing analysis, you consider some of these different elements of the text and then form an argument for why the author chose to use them. You can do so while reading and during class discussion, but it’s particularly important when writing essays. 

Literary analysis is notably distinct from summary. When you write a summary , you efficiently describe the work’s main ideas or plot points in order to establish an overview of the work. While you might use elements of summary when writing analysis, you should do so minimally. You can reference a plot line to make a point, but it should be done so quickly so you can focus on why that plot line matters . In summary (see what we did there?), a summary focuses on the “ what ” of a text, while analysis turns attention to the “ how ” and “ why .”

While literary analysis can be broad, covering themes across an entire work, it can also be very specific, and sometimes the best analysis is just that. Literary critics have written thousands of words about the meaning of an author’s single word choice; while you might not want to be quite that particular, there’s a lot to be said for digging deep in literary analysis, rather than wide. 

Although you’re forming your own argument about the work, it’s not your opinion . You should avoid passing judgment on the piece and instead objectively consider what the author intended, how they went about executing it, and whether or not they were successful in doing so. Literary criticism is similar to literary analysis, but it is different in that it does pass judgement on the work. Criticism can also consider literature more broadly, without focusing on a singular work. 

Once you understand what constitutes (and doesn’t constitute) literary analysis, it’s easy to identify it. Here are some examples of literary analysis and its oft-confused counterparts: 

Summary: In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator visits his friend Roderick Usher and witnesses his sister escape a horrible fate.  

Opinion: In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe uses his great Gothic writing to establish a sense of spookiness that is enjoyable to read. 

Literary Analysis: “Throughout ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ Poe foreshadows the fate of Madeline by creating a sense of claustrophobia for the reader through symbols, such as in the narrator’s inability to leave and the labyrinthine nature of the house. 

In summary, literary analysis is:

• Breaking a work into its components
• Identifying what those components are and how they work in the text
• Developing an understanding of how they work together to achieve a goal 
• Not an opinion, but subjective 
• Not a summary, though summary can be used in passing 
• Best when it deeply, rather than broadly, analyzes a literary element

Literary Analysis and Other Works

As discussed above, literary analysis is often performed upon a single work—but it doesn’t have to be. It can also be performed across works to consider the interplay of two or more texts. Regardless of whether or not the works were written about the same thing, or even within the same time period, they can have an influence on one another or a connection that’s worth exploring. And reading two or more texts side by side can help you to develop insights through comparison and contrast.

For example, Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in the 17th century, based largely on biblical narratives written some 700 years before and which later influenced 19th century poet John Keats. The interplay of works can be obvious, as here, or entirely the inspiration of the analyst. As an example of the latter, you could compare and contrast the writing styles of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe who, while contemporaries in terms of time, were vastly different in their content. 

Additionally, literary analysis can be performed between a work and its context. Authors are often speaking to the larger context of their times, be that social, political, religious, economic, or artistic. A valid and interesting form is to compare the author’s context to the work, which is done by identifying and analyzing elements that are used to make an argument about the writer’s time or experience. 

For example, you could write an essay about how Hemingway’s struggles with mental health and paranoia influenced his later work, or how his involvement in the Spanish Civil War influenced his early work. One approach focuses more on his personal experience, while the other turns to the context of his times—both are valid. 

Why Does Literary Analysis Matter? 

Sometimes an author wrote a work of literature strictly for entertainment’s sake, but more often than not, they meant something more. Whether that was a missive on world peace, commentary about femininity, or an allusion to their experience as an only child, the author probably wrote their work for a reason, and understanding that reason—or the many reasons—can actually make reading a lot more meaningful. 

Performing literary analysis as a form of study unquestionably makes you a better reader. It’s also likely that it will improve other skills, too, like critical thinking, creativity, debate, and reasoning. 

At its grandest and most idealistic, literary analysis even has the ability to make the world a better place. By reading and analyzing works of literature, you are able to more fully comprehend the perspectives of others. Cumulatively, you’ll broaden your own perspectives and contribute more effectively to the things that matter to you. 

Literary Terms to Know for Literary Analysis 

There are hundreds of literary devices you could consider during your literary analysis, but there are some key tools most writers utilize to achieve their purpose—and therefore you need to know in order to understand that purpose. These common devices include: 

• Characters: The people (or entities) who play roles in the work. The protagonist is the main character in the work. 
• Conflict: The conflict is the driving force behind the plot, the event that causes action in the narrative, usually on the part of the protagonist
• Context : The broader circumstances surrounding the work political and social climate in which it was written or the experience of the author. It can also refer to internal context, and the details presented by the narrator 
• Diction : The word choice used by the narrator or characters 
• Genre: A category of literature characterized by agreed upon similarities in the works, such as subject matter and tone
• Imagery : The descriptive or figurative language used to paint a picture in the reader’s mind so they can picture the story’s plot, characters, and setting 
• Metaphor: A figure of speech that uses comparison between two unlike objects for dramatic or poetic effect
• Narrator: The person who tells the story. Sometimes they are a character within the story, but sometimes they are omniscient and removed from the plot. 
• Plot : The storyline of the work
• Point of view: The perspective taken by the narrator, which skews the perspective of the reader 
• Setting : The time and place in which the story takes place. This can include elements like the time period, weather, time of year or day, and social or economic conditions 
• Symbol : An object, person, or place that represents an abstract idea that is greater than its literal meaning 
• Syntax : The structure of a sentence, either narration or dialogue, and the tone it implies
• Theme : A recurring subject or message within the work, often commentary on larger societal or cultural ideas
• Tone : The feeling, attitude, or mood the text presents

How to Perform Literary Analysis

Step 1: read the text thoroughly.

Literary analysis begins with the literature itself, which means performing a close reading of the text. As you read, you should focus on the work. That means putting away distractions (sorry, smartphone) and dedicating a period of time to the task at hand. 

It’s also important that you don’t skim or speed read. While those are helpful skills, they don’t apply to literary analysis—or at least not this stage. 

Step 2: Take Notes as You Read  

As you read the work, take notes about different literary elements and devices that stand out to you. Whether you highlight or underline in text, use sticky note tabs to mark pages and passages, or handwrite your thoughts in a notebook, you should capture your thoughts and the parts of the text to which they correspond. This—the act of noticing things about a literary work—is literary analysis. 

Step 3: Notice Patterns 

As you read the work, you’ll begin to notice patterns in the way the author deploys language, themes, and symbols to build their plot and characters. As you read and these patterns take shape, begin to consider what they could mean and how they might fit together. 

As you identify these patterns, as well as other elements that catch your interest, be sure to record them in your notes or text. Some examples include: 

• Circle or underline words or terms that you notice the author uses frequently, whether those are nouns (like “eyes” or “road”) or adjectives (like “yellow” or “lush”).
• Highlight phrases that give you the same kind of feeling. For example, if the narrator describes an “overcast sky,” a “dreary morning,” and a “dark, quiet room,” the words aren’t the same, but the feeling they impart and setting they develop are similar. 
• Underline quotes or prose that define a character’s personality or their role in the text.
• Use sticky tabs to color code different elements of the text, such as specific settings or a shift in the point of view. 

By noting these patterns, comprehensive symbols, metaphors, and ideas will begin to come into focus.  

Step 4: Consider the Work as a Whole, and Ask Questions

This is a step that you can do either as you read, or after you finish the text. The point is to begin to identify the aspects of the work that most interest you, and you could therefore analyze in writing or discussion. 

Questions you could ask yourself include: 

• What aspects of the text do I not understand?
• What parts of the narrative or writing struck me most?
• What patterns did I notice?
• What did the author accomplish really well?
• What did I find lacking?
• Did I notice any contradictions or anything that felt out of place?  
• What was the purpose of the minor characters?
• What tone did the author choose, and why? 

The answers to these and more questions will lead you to your arguments about the text. 

Step 5: Return to Your Notes and the Text for Evidence

As you identify the argument you want to make (especially if you’re preparing for an essay), return to your notes to see if you already have supporting evidence for your argument. That’s why it’s so important to take notes or mark passages as you read—you’ll thank yourself later!

If you’re preparing to write an essay, you’ll use these passages and ideas to bolster your argument—aka, your thesis. There will likely be multiple different passages you can use to strengthen multiple different aspects of your argument. Just be sure to cite the text correctly! 

If you’re preparing for class, your notes will also be invaluable. When your teacher or professor leads the conversation in the direction of your ideas or arguments, you’ll be able to not only proffer that idea but back it up with textual evidence. That’s an A+ in class participation. 

Step 6: Connect These Ideas Across the Narrative

Whether you’re in class or writing an essay, literary analysis isn’t complete until you’ve considered the way these ideas interact and contribute to the work as a whole. You can find and present evidence, but you still have to explain how those elements work together and make up your argument. 

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay

When conducting literary analysis while reading a text or discussing it in class, you can pivot easily from one argument to another (or even switch sides if a classmate or teacher makes a compelling enough argument). 

But when writing literary analysis, your objective is to propose a specific, arguable thesis and convincingly defend it. In order to do so, you need to fortify your argument with evidence from the text (and perhaps secondary sources) and an authoritative tone. 

A successful literary analysis essay depends equally on a thoughtful thesis, supportive analysis, and presenting these elements masterfully. We’ll review how to accomplish these objectives below. 

Step 1: Read the Text. Maybe Read It Again. 

Constructing an astute analytical essay requires a thorough knowledge of the text. As you read, be sure to note any passages, quotes, or ideas that stand out. These could serve as the future foundation of your thesis statement. Noting these sections now will help you when you need to gather evidence. 

The more familiar you become with the text, the better (and easier!) your essay will be. Familiarity with the text allows you to speak (or in this case, write) to it confidently. If you only skim the book, your lack of rich understanding will be evident in your essay. Alternatively, if you read the text closely—especially if you read it more than once, or at least carefully revisit important passages—your own writing will be filled with insight that goes beyond a basic understanding of the storyline. 

Step 2: Brainstorm Potential Topics 

Because you took detailed notes while reading the text, you should have a list of potential topics at the ready. Take time to review your notes, highlighting any ideas or questions you had that feel interesting. You should also return to the text and look for any passages that stand out to you. 

When considering potential topics, you should prioritize ideas that you find interesting. It won’t only make the whole process of writing an essay more fun, your enthusiasm for the topic will probably improve the quality of your argument, and maybe even your writing. Just like it’s obvious when a topic interests you in a conversation, it’s obvious when a topic interests the writer of an essay (and even more obvious when it doesn’t). 

Your topic ideas should also be specific, unique, and arguable. A good way to think of topics is that they’re the answer to fairly specific questions. As you begin to brainstorm, first think of questions you have about the text. Questions might focus on the plot, such as: Why did the author choose to deviate from the projected storyline? Or why did a character’s role in the narrative shift? Questions might also consider the use of a literary device, such as: Why does the narrator frequently repeat a phrase or comment on a symbol? Or why did the author choose to switch points of view each chapter? 

Once you have a thesis question , you can begin brainstorming answers—aka, potential thesis statements . At this point, your answers can be fairly broad. Once you land on a question-statement combination that feels right, you’ll then look for evidence in the text that supports your answer (and helps you define and narrow your thesis statement). 

For example, after reading “ The Fall of the House of Usher ,” you might be wondering, Why are Roderick and Madeline twins?, Or even: Why does their relationship feel so creepy?” Maybe you noticed (and noted) that the narrator was surprised to find out they were twins, or perhaps you found that the narrator’s tone tended to shift and become more anxious when discussing the interactions of the twins.

Once you come up with your thesis question, you can identify a broad answer, which will become the basis for your thesis statement. In response to the questions above, your answer might be, “Poe emphasizes the close relationship of Roderick and Madeline to foreshadow that their deaths will be close, too.” 

Step 3: Gather Evidence 

Once you have your topic (or you’ve narrowed it down to two or three), return to the text (yes, again) to see what evidence you can find to support it. If you’re thinking of writing about the relationship between Roderick and Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” look for instances where they engaged in the text. 

This is when your knowledge of literary devices comes in clutch. Carefully study the language around each event in the text that might be relevant to your topic. How does Poe’s diction or syntax change during the interactions of the siblings? How does the setting reflect or contribute to their relationship? What imagery or symbols appear when Roderick and Madeline are together? 

By finding and studying evidence within the text, you’ll strengthen your topic argument—or, just as valuably, discount the topics that aren’t strong enough for analysis. 

Step 4: Consider Secondary Sources 

In addition to returning to the literary work you’re studying for evidence, you can also consider secondary sources that reference or speak to the work. These can be articles from journals you find on JSTOR, books that consider the work or its context, or articles your teacher shared in class. 

While you can use these secondary sources to further support your idea, you should not overuse them. Make sure your topic remains entirely differentiated from that presented in the source. 

Step 5: Write a Working Thesis Statement

Once you’ve gathered evidence and narrowed down your topic, you’re ready to refine that topic into a thesis statement. As you continue to outline and write your paper, this thesis statement will likely change slightly, but this initial draft will serve as the foundation of your essay. It’s like your north star: Everything you write in your essay is leading you back to your thesis. 

Writing a great thesis statement requires some real finesse. A successful thesis statement is: 

• Debatable : You shouldn’t simply summarize or make an obvious statement about the work. Instead, your thesis statement should take a stand on an issue or make a claim that is open to argument. You’ll spend your essay debating—and proving—your argument. 
• Demonstrable : You need to be able to prove, through evidence, that your thesis statement is true. That means you have to have passages from the text and correlative analysis ready to convince the reader that you’re right. 
• Specific : In most cases, successfully addressing a theme that encompasses a work in its entirety would require a book-length essay. Instead, identify a thesis statement that addresses specific elements of the work, such as a relationship between characters, a repeating symbol, a key setting, or even something really specific like the speaking style of a character. 

Example: By depicting the relationship between Roderick and Madeline to be stifling and almost otherworldly in its closeness, Poe foreshadows both Madeline’s fate and Roderick’s inability to choose a different fate for himself. 

Step 6: Write an Outline 

You have your thesis, you have your evidence—but how do you put them together? A great thesis statement (and therefore a great essay) will have multiple arguments supporting it, presenting different kinds of evidence that all contribute to the singular, main idea presented in your thesis. 

Review your evidence and identify these different arguments, then organize the evidence into categories based on the argument they support. These ideas and evidence will become the body paragraphs of your essay. 

For example, if you were writing about Roderick and Madeline as in the example above, you would pull evidence from the text, such as the narrator’s realization of their relationship as twins; examples where the narrator’s tone of voice shifts when discussing their relationship; imagery, like the sounds Roderick hears as Madeline tries to escape; and Poe’s tendency to use doubles and twins in his other writings to create the same spooky effect. All of these are separate strains of the same argument, and can be clearly organized into sections of an outline. 

Step 7: Write Your Introduction

Your introduction serves a few very important purposes that essentially set the scene for the reader: 

• Establish context. Sure, your reader has probably read the work. But you still want to remind them of the scene, characters, or elements you’ll be discussing. 
• Present your thesis statement. Your thesis statement is the backbone of your analytical paper. You need to present it clearly at the outset so that the reader understands what every argument you make is aimed at. 
• Offer a mini-outline. While you don’t want to show all your cards just yet, you do want to preview some of the evidence you’ll be using to support your thesis so that the reader has a roadmap of where they’re going. 

Step 8: Write Your Body Paragraphs

Thanks to steps one through seven, you’ve already set yourself up for success. You have clearly outlined arguments and evidence to support them. Now it’s time to translate those into authoritative and confident prose. 

When presenting each idea, begin with a topic sentence that encapsulates the argument you’re about to make (sort of like a mini-thesis statement). Then present your evidence and explanations of that evidence that contribute to that argument. Present enough material to prove your point, but don’t feel like you necessarily have to point out every single instance in the text where this element takes place. For example, if you’re highlighting a symbol that repeats throughout the narrative, choose two or three passages where it is used most effectively, rather than trying to squeeze in all ten times it appears. 

While you should have clearly defined arguments, the essay should still move logically and fluidly from one argument to the next. Try to avoid choppy paragraphs that feel disjointed; every idea and argument should feel connected to the last, and, as a group, connected to your thesis. A great way to connect the ideas from one paragraph to the next is with transition words and phrases, such as: 

• Furthermore 
• In addition
• On the other hand
• Conversely 

Step 9: Write Your Conclusion 

Your conclusion is more than a summary of your essay's parts, but it’s also not a place to present brand new ideas not already discussed in your essay. Instead, your conclusion should return to your thesis (without repeating it verbatim) and point to why this all matters. If writing about the siblings in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, you could point out that the utilization of twins and doubles is a common literary element of Poe’s work that contributes to the definitive eeriness of Gothic literature. 

While you might speak to larger ideas in your conclusion, be wary of getting too macro. Your conclusion should still be supported by all of the ideas that preceded it. 

Step 10: Revise, Revise, Revise

Of course you should proofread your literary analysis essay before you turn it in. But you should also edit the content to make sure every piece of evidence and every explanation directly supports your thesis as effectively and efficiently as possible. 

Sometimes, this might mean actually adapting your thesis a bit to the rest of your essay. At other times, it means removing redundant examples or paraphrasing quotations. Make sure every sentence is valuable, and remove those that aren’t. 

Other Resources for Literary Analysis 

With these skills and suggestions, you’re well on your way to practicing and writing literary analysis. But if you don’t have a firm grasp on the concepts discussed above—such as literary devices or even the content of the text you’re analyzing—it will still feel difficult to produce insightful analysis. 

If you’d like to sharpen the tools in your literature toolbox, there are plenty of other resources to help you do so: 

• Check out our expansive library of Literary Devices . These could provide you with a deeper understanding of the basic devices discussed above or introduce you to new concepts sure to impress your professors ( anagnorisis , anyone?). 
• This Academic Citation Resource Guide ensures you properly cite any work you reference in your analytical essay. 
• Our English Homework Help Guide will point you to dozens of resources that can help you perform analysis, from critical reading strategies to poetry helpers. 
• This Grammar Education Resource Guide will direct you to plenty of resources to refine your grammar and writing (definitely important for getting an A+ on that paper). 

Of course, you should know the text inside and out before you begin writing your analysis. In order to develop a true understanding of the work, read through its corresponding SuperSummary study guide . Doing so will help you truly comprehend the plot, as well as provide some inspirational ideas for your analysis.

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

“the novel draws on a long tradition of mystical writing that confuses sacred and secular desire.”.

Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Garth Greenwell on Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples , Alex Preston on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 , Blair Braverman on Kevin Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park , Chris Klimek on Steven Hyden’s  There Was Nothing You Could Do , and Grace Byron on Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

“Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples  opens with the most remarkable account of cruising I know. By cruising I mean a specifically gay male practice of organized promiscuity, a form of sexual sociality at once universal—existing, in remarkably similar forms, in rural American truck stops and among Roman ruins—and, as White chronicles it, specific to a particular time and place, the Chelsea piers in nineteen-seventies New York, part of the extravagant, unprecedented gay world that flourished between the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the onset of the aids crisis. In the nighttime scene that opens the book, men brush past each other in the dark, alert in their animal bodies, their senses sharpened by hunger; they send up cigarette flares, displaying themselves against the night sky; they pair off or remain solitary, unchosen—like the narrator, who lingers until sunrise, when finally he finds a man to go home with …

The novel draws on a long tradition of mystical writing that confuses sacred and secular desire, using the language of sexual pleasure to denote spiritual rapture. If nothing else, especially in the context of 1978, this constitutes a remarkable statement about queer lives: that they are possessed of a dignity and significance that can be adequately described only by the resources of the devotional tradition … Far from the heroic queers that populate much post-Stonewall cultural production, the narrator of Nocturnes is melancholic, diffuse, too wan for political action, ‘less a man in time,’ as he says of another character, ‘than a synchronous field of energy’ … White’s novel is best understood, I think, as adhering to an alternative, anti-identitarian queer tradition that has never been wholly congenial to North American readers … It is not merely a historic record, or an essential document of a crucial career, but a psychological study of complexity and depth, and a stylistic performance of an immaculacy seldom achieved.”

–Garth Greenwell on Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples   ( The New Yorker )

“From the very first sentence of Richard Flanagan’s 12th book, Question 7 , the model for this extraordinary, hybrid work is clear. WG Sebald is there in the subject matter: the second world war and the ethics of mass bombing campaigns; the interweaving of personal and political history; the blending of truth, memory and a kind of hyper-real imagined past. Sebald is there in the deeper currents: a somewhat solitary, occasionally ridiculous middle-aged man seeking to come to terms with his place in the world, wrestling in particular with his complex love for a father whose own life was defined by his experiences in the war. It’s there even in the rhythms of the prose. The book begins like a Sebald tribute act, with its stateliness, its subclauses, its melancholy … the story of Flanagan’s attempts to understand his parents, both of whom have recently died, and through them the strange contingency of his own life …

There’s so much more in Flanagan’s beautiful, unclassifiable novel-cum-memoir. There’s the genocide of Tasmania’s Indigenous peoples (and a series of links to HG Wells); there’s the author’s meeting with one of the prison guards who tortured his father; there’s a section at the end in which Flanagan describes his own brush with the capriciousness of existence: an almost fatal kayak accident that reads like 127 Hours . This book already comes laden with praise from its Australian publication–Peter Carey said it ‘may just be the most significant piece of Australian art in the last 100 years.’ That it is a masterpiece is without question. Sebald himself would have been proud of the subtlety, the depth, the intensity of thought and feeling.”

–Alex Preston on Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 ( The Guardian )

“Maybe it’s when he’s extracting drinking water from damp sand with a syringe, trying desperately not to die from dehydration, but there came a point in A Walk in the Park , Kevin Fedarko’s memoir about walking the length of the Grand Canyon, that I thought: Wow, this hike is a terrible idea … He uprooted his life to volunteer for a tour company, handling raw sewage on rafting expeditions in the hope of one day being promoted to the driver’s seat of a dory. As he relates one grievous mishap after another, the reader faces a dawning realization. Wait: Is this guy going to walk the whole canyon because he’s not good enough to row a boat? Indeed—and outdoor literature is the better for it, because A Walk in the Park is a triumph. Fedarko doesn’t describe awe; he induces it, with page-turning action, startling insights and the kind of verbal grace that makes multipage descriptions of, say, a flock of pelicans feel riveting and new …

The book never shies from its paradoxes: I did this so you don’t have to; I did this because you shouldn’t; I shouldn’t have done this, but it’s good I did. By the time the men complete their yearlong hike, they’ve endured and overcome so much that they’re briefly mistaken for plane crash victims. But in truth, they, and we, are pilgrims on holy ground. Readers will be tempted to visit the canyon just to keep the book’s spell alive longer—and to feel Fedarko’s company in their awe.”

–Blair Braverman on Kevin Fedarko’s A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon ( The New York Times Book Review )

“There’s a reason ‘Bruce Springsteen’ is still a viable Halloween costume in 2024, and that reason is Born in the U.S.A. … The Boss’s red-bandanna-and-sleeveless-flannel-shirt phase was only a blip within a performing career that has now spanned more than half a century. More than a dozen Springsteen albums have been packaged behind portraits of his invariably careworn mug; only Born in the U.S.A. came swaddled in an Annie Leibovitz close-up of the denim-clad Boss-terior. But it was this synthesizer-heavy era that made Springsteen a permanent celebrity beyond the sphere of music fandom—and made it possible for the 74-year-old to continue filling stadiums even now, despite how profoundly the America beyond them has changed.

The disappearance of that metaphorical breadbasket, wherein the workaholic Springsteen briefly became an unlikely figure of national consensus, is the subject of ride-or-die Springsteen fan Steven Hyden’s new book … Hyden is an imaginative cultural omnivore, which means his critical examination occasionally takes the form of something like fan fiction … Your appetite for these kinds of fanboy thought experiments is a reliable gauge of whether this book is for you. If Springsteen’s red-headband, swole-arms incarnation is the only one you’d recognize at a costume party, it might not be. But if the sight of a bejeweled, haunted-looking man with slicked-back hair and a goatee makes your brain say, ‘ Tom Joad -era Bruce,’ it definitely is.”

–Chris Klimek on Steven Hyden’s  There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland ( The Washington Post )

“Through this intimate examination of desire and destruction, Hansbury builds a careful tale of growing up in an age when mystery was the defining characteristic of the trans experience, opening up the untidiness of trans identity and the fractures that occur when navigating a world without mentors or father figures. Hansbury doesn’t attempt to offer a neat tale of representation or trauma, but instead digs into one particular trans man’s embodied experience and struggle to contextualize his childhood and unsatisfying adulthood. Through Mel and Max, Hansbury is able to explore trans identity at a curious slant, offering a story of the trans-masculine experience that evokes the dangers of a boyhood lived in the shadow of girlhood. If girlhood is about reckoning with a lack of bodily autonomy in Hanbsury’s novel, masculinity is about unfettered anger …

This is a curious formulation of identity, one that few novelists have dared to explore: the mirroring possibilities of trans men and women and our relationships and responsibilities to one another … By alternating between girlhood and manhood, Hansbury explores the jaggedness of identity and the lack of easy gendered delineations. This allows the reader a way into understanding Max’s bitterness at being read as only a man, or as someone incapable of perpetuating misogyny … Imperfect as he is, Max grows up by the end of this novel, becoming the mentor he so desperately craved as a child. Through him, Hansbury has created a character all too rare in the world of contemporary literary fiction: a man who is able to extend compassion across generations. His life, then, is more than a tense and moving story—it is also a puzzle formed by the spikiness of identity.”

–Grace Byron on Griffin Hansbury’s Some Strange Music Draws Me In ( The Nation )

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Previous Article

Next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

Literary Catharsis: Jenna Tang on Translating Lin Yi-Han’s Infamous Novel, Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

• school Campus Bookshelves
• menu_book Bookshelves
• perm_media Learning Objects
• login Login
• how_to_reg Request Instructor Account
• hub Instructor Commons

Margin Size

• Download Page (PDF)
• Download Full Book (PDF)
• Periodic Table
• Physics Constants
• Scientific Calculator
• Reference & Cite
• Tools expand_more
• Readability

selected template will load here

This action is not available.

2.2: Video- The Danger of a Single Story

• Last updated
• Save as PDF
• Page ID 22414
• Lumen Learning

\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)

\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)

\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)

\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)

\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)

\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)

\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)

\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}}      % arrow\)

\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)

\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story”

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: pb.libretexts.org/temp/?p=684

• International
• Schools directory
• Resources Jobs Schools directory News Search

IGCSE English Literature (0475) tips

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

28 May 2024

• Share through email
• Share through twitter
• Share through linkedin
• Share through facebook
• Share through pinterest

This powerpoint explains how to go about writing essays for the IGCSE literature examination. It focusses on the structure and progression of the essay writing process in exam conditions! The ppt illustrates how to improve a student’s essay and can be a good revision tool before the final exam

Tes paid licence How can I reuse this?

Your rating is required to reflect your happiness.

It's good to leave some feedback.

Something went wrong, please try again later.

This resource hasn't been reviewed yet

To ensure quality for our reviews, only customers who have purchased this resource can review it

Report this resource to let us know if it violates our terms and conditions. Our customer service team will review your report and will be in touch.

Not quite what you were looking for? Search by keyword to find the right resource:

Video clips Academic Reading and Writing

The Academic Language Centre has developed 19 video clips on Academic Skills. The videos are divided into three categories. Watch them below for a good start to your studies!

Introduction

This video can not be shown because you did not accept cookies.

Reading and using sources

Planning and writing, writing an argumentative essay, for lecturers.

The aim is to enable departments and programmes to integrate academic skills into the content areas of the curriculum. These video clips can be used for this purpose. The video clips are accompanied by a teacher's guide  to support the integration of the modules.