We are about to start your first attempt at writing a Formal Literary Essay! This is a big deal! If you learn it correctly the first time doing it, the process will be much more easy for all the other times you’ll repeat it in Grades 11 and 12.

So we don’t look at too much at once, I have started your essay writing instruction in pieces – we’ve looked at:

• what a five paragraph essay should look like in general
• what the three body paragraphs should be about and how to organize them (first, second and third)
• ways that a Literary essay is different from what you’ve tried before. (It discusses opinions about the writing or purpose etc, instead of discussing events of plot.)
• the structure of writing a seven-sentence body paragraph and why that structure is important. (Without it, students so often fall into the trap of writing plot summary, instead of giving background, context to the reference, integrating the reference, etc)
• Most recently, we have looked at examples of essays and body paragraphs and students spent time identifying the positives of each and some negatives. This video is about 30 minutes long and will be important to understand before our next class.

You can consider writing a few things down, like what the errors are in body paragraph writing so you can avoid those same errors.