Article Analysis Research:
These steps should help you figure out what goes into a published essay in an academic journal. Journal essays are usually from seven to ten thousand words, approximately twenty to thirty double-spaced pages. They look something like a seminar paper and I think they provide a good model for how you might write a seminar paper.
They also interpret literature; to position yourself as a critic and to explain your own interpretation of texts, it’s important to analyze and understand what these articles say.
First Steps
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First, enter the MLA citation for the essay. See the Research and Documentation section of the Diana
Hacker Web site for details (http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/resdoc5e/RES5e_ch08_s1-0011.html).
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As you get started, read through the essay carefully. Pay attention especially to the first five paragraphs: the author will almost always state his or her thesis in those paragraphs. If necessary, stop after the fifth paragraph and re-read. If you are still confused, skip to the final three paragraphs. Often understanding what the article concludes will help you identify the thesis in the beginning.
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Then write down what you think the author’s argument is. Be sure you explain the critic's major claim— the thing they say that others could disagree with (or have already), not just their topic or what they “talk about.”
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Next, copy the thesis of the essay verbatim.
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Then, paraphrase what you think is the research question.
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Finally, write down how the essay adds new knowledge or a different way of seeing to that research problem. Scholars usually state this explicitly as they define their critical position and review points from other critics.
Second Steps
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Pay attention to the early section of the essay: does the author position herself in relation to what other scholars have said about the topic? How does she do that? How many other scholars does she name?
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As you read the essay, make a note by each new section. These sections may be marked by new headings, or the author might move more subtly through the main evidentiary or supporting points for his or her argument.
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Briefly summarize the point for each section, noting the page numbers for each section.
Third Steps
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As you read the essay, underline what you see as the most important or exciting points.
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Consider whether these points support your own research question.
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Make a list (with parenthetical page numbers) of those sentences and phrases that you think are most important in the essay.
Developed by Dr. Colleen C. O’Brien, USC Upstate, © Fall 2010
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

EXAMPLE:
O’Brien, Colleen C. “What the Dickens?: Representations of Slavery and Intertextual Influence in Julia
Collins’s The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride”
African American Review 40.4 (2007): 661-685.
First Steps:
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I think the argument is that, although novels about white-looking heroines in domestic situations seem to have nothing to do with black civil rights, Collins’s novel is implicitly about emancipation and voting in the aftermath of the Civil War.
 Verbatim: “And yet, by applying these familiar narrative tropes to the experience of black women during slavery and the controversial issue of miscegenation, Collins addresses key political issues; by recasting miscegenation and black female virtue, she enters the debate over black citizenship in 1865” (661).
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The question is: Why does Collins use literary conventions that white authors have used for decades rather than addressing the issues of black civil rights directly?
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Although her resonance with Dickens or Bronte might suggest that she merely wants to be a famous author or copies their novelistic forms out of admiration, the appropriation of famous works is actually a strategy that permits women to engage in contentious political debates.
Second Steps :
Critical Positioning: This particular article does not begin with a list of previous scholarship because it was one of the first published about Julia Collins; it mentions Robert Levine (662), Teresa Goddu (663) and other scholars at various points throughout the essay.
Section I: 661-665.
Within her literary and historical contexts, Collins's echoes of
Dickens's novel in her own show that for her fiction enabled an indictment of social injustice and the creation of a script for social change.
Section II: “The Inheritance of Virtue,” 665-672. In The Curse of Caste, among the ruling class in America, social assumptions about black female sexuality work to exclude black women from a specific gendered definition of virtue that merits the protection of the marriage contract and other political rights.
The heroine inherits virtue from her enslaved mother, so Collins reverses the stereotype and recuperates black female virtue.
Section III: “Haunted Portraits,” 672-677
. The familiar gothic trope of the haunted portrait, in Collins’s novel, authenticates a place of belonging for African Americans within the privileged “American national family.”
Section IV: “Law, Inheritance, and Liberal Ideology,” 677-681. The family drama in this novel provides a roadmap for including the freedpeople in the system of rights due all members of the “American national family.”
Third Steps:
I already feel like a diva for using my own essay as an example, so I am not going to list my favorite quotes. That part is fairly simple and straightforward—just make a list of the phrases and sentences you find most useful. You will cite these in your own essay.
Developed by Dr. Colleen C. O’Brien, USC Upstate, © Fall 2010
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.