Welcome To Fun Tips From Your Local Burnt Out Humanities Magnet Student
Im gonna learn y'all a thing or two about analyzing writing, mainly poetry cause it’s the form of writing most meant for analysis.
This is an ideal guide for those of you don’t like analyzing things or aren’t a natural at it, cause same.
I’ll leave an example of an analysis of my own that I did for english at the end. It’s not the best but it’s there.
Okay so Step One: Realize that what you’re saying is dumb as shit.
Yeah you read right. You need to come to terms with the fact that this makes NO fucking sense whatsoever. Literally no sense. You’re going to be talking about how commas enhance the meaning, how a singular word has a paragraph worth of meaning, how the rhythm of a poem affects the meaning of the poem. This shit doesn’t make any fucking sense. I’m aware. We're all aware. Just go with it.
Step Two: Know your literary devices.
You gotta know your figurative language and shit. In general anything about how the sentence or paragraph formatted is sentence structure. Anything about the word or letter choice is language. And anything like metaphors, similes, etc. is figurative language.
Step Three: Just. Write.
Just write shit. Dude I’m serious literally just pick a word, a piece of punctuation, whatever and just. Go with it.
For example, in my own analysis of “Hap” linked down below, I picked the word “slain”. When I think of the word “slain”, I honestly think of dragons. The poem is about a guy mad that a higher power won’t come down and explain his sadness. So, when I heard slain my brain said “slain=dragons, dragons=happiness.” so I explained that I thought the happiness was taken down violently by the sadness. Reiterate that for 2-3 sentences, and boom, A+. Just. Write.
Miscellaneous Tips:
-Don’t focus to hard on figurative language. It’s generally a lot harder to explain the connotations of a metaphor than it is if you just pick a single word or piece of punctuation and just kinda bullshit.
-If you’re struggling to explain your point with a specific piece of literary devices, pick a different one. I suppose this wouldn’t work if you were assigned a piece to analyze, but if that’s the case just take a break for a bit, refocus, and try to bullshit some stuff again.
-Again, just go with it. Just go with the dumb shit. It’s all good.
And you should be good! My analysis of “Hap” is here, you can use that as a reference for some things if you want.
Have fun bullshitting your analysis, friends!