When approaching the task of composing an essay about a short story, you may wonder what you are supposed to write about. You read the story, and you even feel like you have a good understanding of it. What now?

Generally speaking, when a college professor asks you to write an essay on a work of literature, the professor wants you to write an argumentative essay. This means that your thesis, or central argument, should make some debatable claim. You should say something about the story that you can imagine some reasonable person disagreeing with. You might even think that most people would easily agree with your stance, as long as you can imagine some reasonable person who would dispute it. In other words, your argument should not be so obviously true that no one would disagree. If you were to write an essay arguing that Walker’s “Everyday Use” is a story about women of color in the American South, that would not be a very interesting essay because your point is indisputable to anyone who has read the story. This does not mean, however, that you should only bother to make outlandish, sensationalist, or controversial arguments.

A good way to get started finding your argument is to ask questions about the story, particularly those without obvious answers. Focus on those aspects of the story that remain ambiguous after your first or second reading. For example, perhaps after reading Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” you’re left wondering why the narrator, who often is presented as a thoughtful individual, never writes to his brother (Sonny) while Sonny is in prison. You have a hunch that the lack of letters has more to do with the narrator himself than any another person. Importantly, however, we cannot make our arguments based on mere conjecture. We must have textual evidence, or quotations from the text, to support any claims that we make. After sifting through the text, you find several passages that suggest that the narrators thinking about the situation is primarily focused on his own interior life. For example, after his first communication with Sonny, it seems as if pent-up emotions come pouring out. When I saw him, many things I had forgotten came flooding back to me,” the narrator writes, as well as “I was remembering, and it made it hard to catch my breath.” In both cases, what becomes central–to this seemingly external relationship–is the story of one man’s interior life.  If,  as you continue reading, you find additional examples of the narrator’s interior struggles, then you are ready to put these pieces together and make an argument. Your thesis may read as follows: “The narrator’s ’s concern with his brother’s life and well-being is a self-serving attempt to make him feel good about himself, appeasing his persistent worry that he let Sonny down.” This is a debatable claim about the way narrator’s character flaw drives the plot of the story that you can support with evidence from the text (a warning, though, to be careful around thesis-statements that make near-moral judgments about the text/characters). From there you can make claims about the importance of your observations for the larger meaning of the story. Based on your argument, you might say that the theme of the story is that seemingly selfless actions may often derive from selfish purposes.