A college essay about a work of literature has a certain shape. This shape shifts, morphs and changes a bit due to context and circumstance, but the basics remain in place. For instance, you're going to need an anchor (call it the thesis statement, controlling argument, or claim). What is the non-obvious thing that your paper will focus on? If you're writing about a short story, poem, or other literary work, you'll need to include verbatim quotations from the story. This is a primary source. Sometimes this will just be a word or two, and sometimes it will be a couple of sentences. I would highly discourage direct quotations of more than two sentences. You want to do this to keep your reader in the firm orbit of your voice. The same is quite obviously true for integrating secondary sources.
This video is a bit boring, but stay with it: It does a great job of providing the basics about the shape of an essay.
This video, by the late novelist and essayist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is not boring at all. Vonnegut talks about how most stories can be mapped on an X-Y axis.
This online tool from our overlords at Google is called the N-Gram Viewer. If you love language, you can play around with this program forever!
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