Excessive Plot Summary and Paraphrase of a Literary Work
Problem: Unnecessary plot summary or excessive content paraphrase substituted for students' own analysis and interpretation
Brief, pointed summaries and paraphrases relevant to the student's thesis and supporting points do serve important functions in a literary essay. However, students who lack experience and confidence in writing literary essays can easily lapse into filling their papers with too much plot summary and content paraphrase of the literary work/s under discussion. Inexperienced writers may fail to consider the targeted audience for whom they are writing. Extensive plot summary and content paraphrase of required literary works is unnecessary in literary paper assignments that are written for the teacher and other students in the class. That is, this targeted audience has already read and studied the required literary work/s and do not need or want blow-by-blow plot or situation summaries or extended paraphrases of the content. What readers do want is the student author's own thoughtful interpretation of the meaning and significance of a literary work, supported by well-selected textual evidence (i.e. summary, paraphrase, and/or quotation from the literary work), reasoned analysis, and cogent explanation that will help both student author and readers better understand the literary work.
Plot summaries and content paraphrases of a primary literary work weaken student essays when presented without the student's own necessary analysis and interpretation. Most literary paper assignments ask students to write an essay advancing a central thesis—the student's claim for a particular interpretation of the meaning and significance of a literary work—and including a body organized by a series of minor claims (i.e. topic sentences unifying the content of body paragraphs), each of which should be persuasively developed with relevant textual evidence, analysis, and explanation. Yet even successful essay writers may not understand, at first, how to apply their essay writing skills to structure and develop a specialized essay assignment in writing literary criticism. In literary essays, selective summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation from the literary text/s under discussion typically constitute the most cogent type of evidence that students can present to illustrate and support their interpretative points. But such textual evidence should not be expected to stand alone and speak for itself. Such evidence should be carefully selected and placed in the body of the essay and accompanied by analysis and explanation necessary to make it clear to readers how and why the cited textual evidence supports the student author's points.
Solutions
If you are assigned to write an essay of literary criticism, remember and try to apply basic principles of effective essay writing that you have already learned. While you should avoid extensive and unnecessary plot summaries and content paraphrases, brief, pointed, well-placed summaries and paraphrases do serve important conventions and functions in literary essays.
One convention of the academic essay is to provide a formal introduction to the focused topic and thesis in the first paragraph/s. In a literary essay, formal introduction of the focused topic means you should fully identify the literary work and author to be discussed, and provide a brief summary of principal plot actions, main characters involved, dramatic situation and/or setting of the literary work. Even if your targeted audience is your teacher and other students in the class already familiar with the literary work, your teachers and readers will expect you to follow these conventions.
In body paragraph development, selective and sparing use of summary, paraphrase, as well as direct quotation, from a literary work typically serves as persuasive specific textual evidence to support and illustrate your points of analysis and interpretation. Effective literary papers integrate carefully selected textual evidence from the literary work with pointed commentary, which presents explanatory analysis and interpretation of the textual evidence, accompanied by explicit transitions that connect and demonstrate the relevance of textual evidence to your essay thesis and body paragraph supporting claims.
Reliance on Others' Literary Criticism Instead of Your Own
Brief, well-selected direct quotations from a literary text typically serve as the most persuasive type of textual evidence marshaled to support key points of a student's interpretation in a literary essay. However, two common problems bedevil students' use of textual quotations in their literary papers: inexperienced students often quote more than is necessary to make their essay points and/or mistakenly assume that quotations can speak for themselves without the student authors' guiding commentary.
Problem: Excessive use of long quotations
Student writers often quote more than is necessary to illustrate and support their essay points, opting for quotations of entire sentences and long passages from a literary work, when their interpretive points could be made more concisely and effectively by quoting shorter portions of the literary text or blending quoted fragments with paraphrase. This problem weakens student literary essays and is probably rooted in student confusion about correct citation procedures and fear of making mistakes.
Problem: Use of long quotations and strings of quotations without student's own analysis and interpretation
More damaging than the problem above to the success of literary papers is students' false assumption that quotations from a literary work can stand alone and speak for themselves without student authors' guiding commentary. Student writers who neglect the crucial tasks of analysis and interpretation are probably not anticipating the needs and divergent opinions of readers and perhaps misunderstanding the nature and purpose of literary criticism. Interpretation of a literary work means to explain its meaning and significance, usually undertaken to help oneself and others better understand the literary work. Analysis means to break the work down into its constituent parts, and single out those parts deemed most significant to a student author's essay points, and interpret the meaning, function, significance of those parts to understanding the literary work. The student author who expects quotations to speak for themselves often mistakenly assumes that their meaning and significance will be "obvious," that all readers will single out, emphasize, and interpret key words and passages in the same way that the student author does. But, in fact, rich literary works are subject to multiple interpretations and lively debate by different readers over time, and yield no single obvious "right" or "wrong" answers in unlocking their meaning and significance. These facts are quickly realized by students who actively attend to and engage in open class discussion of a literary work, and/or who conduct serious research in literary criticism on the literary work. A student author should present a literary paper as one interpretation among many, written for readers who may have very different interpretations of a literary work. Student authors should fully and convincingly develop their essays of literary interpretation: textual evidence (quotation, paraphrase, or summary) should not be expected to explain itself. It is the student author's responsibility to select relevant quotations to support her/his essay points, provide interpretative analysis of quotations, and explain the relevance of the selected quotations to his/her points in an essay.
Solutions
The MLA Handbook advises writers to use quotations "selectively" and to "keep all quotations as brief as possible" (Gibaldi 109). Select the most relevant quotations that best support or illustrate your analysis and interpretation, and quote only as much as needed to make your interpretive point. To achieve these goals, you may need to quote only clauses or fragments of sentences from the original literary text or quote fragments blended with paraphrase. In the process of integrating quotations and paraphrases, you will also be expected to maintain the grammatical correctness and clarity of your sentences. Particularly challenging for students new to writing literary papers is learning how to correctly punctuate sentences integrating quotation and learning how to use ellipsis and brackets to indicate any necessary changes made within quoted portions of the literary text.
Quotation, paraphrase, and summary from the primary literary work provide the most relevant and convincing textual evidence in literary papers, and this evidence should be selected, organized, and integrated into your paper in order to develop, illustrate, and support your interpretation persuasively. Effective development of your claims and evidence with explanation, example, and analysis is necessary to convince an audience of diverse readers who may hold very different opinions and pluralistic interpretations of the literary work. As a general rule, all quotation, as well as paraphrase and summary, from the primary literary work should be accompanied by your own commentary to achieve these goals.
Some passages or sentences of an original source may be particularly difficult for both you and your readers to understand and interpret, because the language is complex, confusing, dense, abstract, archaic, ambiguous, and/or subject to multiple interpretation. If such difficult passages embody points that are important to understanding the meaning and significance of a text—especially of a primary literary work that is the topic of your literary paper—they should not simply be ignored. Yet neither should such difficult passages be quoted without supplying your own illuminating paraphrase and commentary to explain how you interpret the meaning of passage and why the passage is relevant to your literary argument.
Blending Quotation, Paraphrase, and Summary with Analysis and Interpretation
Effective literary essays integrate carefully selected textual evidence from the literary work with pointed commentary, which presents persuasive analysis and interpretation of the textual evidence, accompanied by explicit transitions that connect and demonstrate the relevance of textual evidence to your thesis and supporting claims.
In the following body paragraph from Patrick Mooney's student paper "The Existential Anguish of J. Alfred Prufrock," Mooney effectively supports and illustrates his points of interpretation and analysis with well-selected quotation and paraphrase. Mooney presents his interpretative claim of the underlying key to understanding Prufrock's character in sentence 3, but only after acknowledging a common alternative viewpoint in sentence 1. Notice that Mooney draws textual evidence from many parts of the T. S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," quotes only enough to make his points, effectively blends quotation with paraphrase in sentences 2 and 5, and all quotations and paraphrases are accompanied by correct MLA style parenthetical in-text citations of line numbers. The full bibliographical entry for Eliot's poem provided by Mooney is given in the Works Cited in this section of the site.
It is true that Prufrock's overtly expressed fears all seem to stem from his aging. For instance, he mentions the thinning of his hair in lines 40, 41, and 82; and the aging itself is mentioned toward the end of the poem: "I grow old . . . I grow old . . . / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled" (120–121). However, all of Prufrock's problems stem from his insecurity and his inability to reveal his interest in the women at the party. "[H]ow should I presume?" he asks several times throughout the poem (54, 61, 68). Prufrock is so entranced and frustrated by the women that every detail, including the arms "braceleted and white and bare" (63), the "long fingers" that smooth away the afternoon (76), and the "skirts that trail along the floor" (102), become everything to him at that moment.
In another body paragraph from a student essay analyzing character, plot, action, and theme in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Krista Williams, the student author, effectively uses quotation, paraphrase, and summary to support her analysis and interpretation. Williams states her mini–claim in the first two (topic) sentences, further explains her interpretation with supporting character analysis and summary in sentences 3 through 5, devotes the second half of the paragraph to presenting specific supporting examples that combine plot summary, quotation, and paraphrase from the novel, and interprets the main point of the textual evidence cited and reiterates her mini–claim in the concluding sentence.
Esperanza's beliefs stem directly from her experiences on Mango Street. She is aware of a domestic trap that exists for the women of Mango Street in which women get married to escape from the homes of their parents but are dependent upon their husbands for the rest of their lives. Esperanza recognizes that sexual relationships lead to marriage, and that marriage leads to a long, domestic, dependent life. Because she wants to avoid such a life, Esperanza avoids sexual relationships. She tries to help her friends avoid this trap as well, but she is unsuccessful because her friends don't recognize the consequences of sexual relationships. At one point in the novel, Esperanza's friend, Sally, agreed to kiss some boys so that they would give her keys back to her. Esperanza was angry at the boys and wanted to defend her friend, so she "ran back down the three flights to the garden where Sally needed to be saved. [She] took three big sticks and a brick and figured this was enough" (Cisneros 97). However, Esperanza was very confused when she arrived to find out that Sally didn't want to be saved. Sally was entering the trap of domesticity, and there was nothing Esperanza could do to stop her. Later, Sally married an abusive marshmallow salesman who never let her out of the house and she was trapped for life. This example shows the reader what life might have been like for Esperanza if she had not avoided sexual relationships.